Introducing Students to Microsoft Azure Notebooks using Jupyter and Python

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The Microsoft Student Partners at UCL ran a recent event with the UCL Data Science Society Facebook event URL: https://www.facebook.com/events/224172471454325/ to introduce students at UCL to Jupyter Notebooks service which is hosted on Azure called Notebooks.azure.com this a FREE service which offers students with o365 accounts or a Microsoft account single sign on.

The event was focused as a BEGINNER-FRIENDLY workshop about Azure Notebooks, brought to you by Microsoft and supported by the UCL Data Science Society!
During the event attendees would learn how you can use Azure Notebooks as an interactive executable canvas to accomplish your data science experimentation and manage your workloads. Azure Notebooks is a free service that uses open source technology called Jupyter to combine code, text, and graphics onto a single canvas, and display it in a browser

For this event, we want to particularly highlight the contribution of certain MSPs at University College London: Chris Obasi, Sidak Pasricha, Carmen Ibanescu, and Slaviana Pavlovich.

On the 28th November we hosted the ‘Data Analysis Tutorial with Microsoft Azure Notebooks Event’, the goal being to give attendees an introduction and basics to working with Jupyter Notebooks using the Azure Notebooks service.

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Before we started, we created a Github repository with Microsoft’s slides (https://github.com/ChrisDO99/UCL-Azure-Notebooks-Event), containing all the code people would need, as well as the two data files we would be working with. Once all attendees had arrived, we promptly began the tutorial, which was on creating your own notebook that loads data files and uses Python to plot different linear regression graphs corresponding to the data.

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This notebook was organised using markdown cells, and attendees later learned how to create a slideshow out of their notebook, as well as how to share their work. At the end of the workshop, of course, attendees were presented complimentary pizza, courtesy of Microsoft.

Attendees came from a variety of backgrounds including neuroscience and statistical analysis, and were interested in applying what they had learned in the workshop to their academics.

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The tutorial used materials provided by Microsoft; it was one of the workshops found on the Github repo inhttps://github.com/MSFTImagine/computerscience/tree/master/Workshop. The content here makes it easy to organise Microsoft workshops on a bevy