Jupyter Notebooks as an Effective Way to Teach Dynamic Programming

Abstract

An introductory course in dynamic programming was created using Jupyter notebook as the delivery medium. While other Jupyter notebook courses restrict themselves to text, images and inline coding, this course leverages Jupyter features and extensions to include a wider range of interactive course elements such as quizzes. The course combines some best practices in teaching dynamic programming to attempt to overcome the difficulties students experience when learning the subject. The paper also presents the results of a peer survey qualifying the success of this new course.