Overview

The following demonstration documents a step-by-step guide to setting up a virtual “Econometrics Lab” hosted by Amazon Web Service (AWS), one of many cloud computing providers. Ultimately, students will be able to connect to an environment to perform live coding on Jupyter Notebooks with Python, R, and Stata kernels.

This demonstration corresponds to workflow 3 outlined in “Econometric Pedagogy and Cloud Computing: Training the Next Generation of Economists and Data Scientists,” by Danielle V. Handel, Anson T. Y. Ho, Kim P. Huynh, David T. Jacho-Chávez, and Carson H. Rea published in the Journal of Econometric Methods. The instructions may be modified to suit different teaching styles and classroom needs.

Functionality

This section showcases a fully operational server and the optional GitHub integration.

Standard Functionality

After entering the lab with a pre-assigned username and password, students may generate new Jupyter Notebooks using Python, R, or Stata. They also may upload notebooks from their local machine or clone repositories from GitHub and work on those. None of this requires installation of any software on the local machine.

(Optional) GitHub Integrated Functionality

Demonstrated below is the additional functionality granted by following the optional sections, GitHub Extensions and Packages and GitHub Authentication.

A student with their free GitHub account setup can select the "Sign in with GitHub" to be prompted to authorize the server to use GitHub when logging in. After selecting the button to authorize, the student will be directed to the JupyterHub interface and may begin working.

The GitHub extension allows the student to access repositories as demonstrated above. By typing in a username, the student will be granted access to all of the public repositories that person has. A students can gain access to assignments directly from their instructor's GitHub.