The CERN@school Coding Challenges

This repository contains a series of Jupyter Notebooks featuring challenges and code related to the analysis of CERN@school data.

• Challenge 01: Particle Counting.

Required software

To use these notebooks, you'll need a system capable of running Jupyter notebooks. We recommend installing Anaconda, which will give you all of the Python software you'll need to get stuck into open data science and analysis with CERN@school.

You can download Anaconda (or Miniconda) for free here.

Running on a CernVM

Anaconda and the CERN@school software has been tested on the GridPP CernVM, a virtual machine image based on the Scientific Linux 6 operating system. While it is possible to run everything on Windows and Mac, we cannot provide support for running natively on these operating systems.

You can find instructions for creating and running a GridPP CernVM here. Once you're up and running, you can install Anaconda/Miniconda as above.

Required packages

Once you've got Anaconda/Miniconda, you'll need to install the following packages with the following command:

$ conda install scipy matplotlib pandas jupyter

(Though they may well be installed already.)

Getting and running the code

While you can view the challenge notebooks in the browser by clicking on the links above, the real power of the notebooks comes from cloning them (or forking the repository) and interacting with them via the Jupyter Notebook platform as follows:

$ cd ~
$ export MY_WORKING_DIRECTORY=tmp # or whatever you want to call it.
$ mkdir $MY_WORKING_DIRECTORY
$ cd $MY_WORKING_DIRECTORY
$ git clone https://github.com/twhyntie/coding-challenges.git
$ cd coding-challenges
$ jupyter notebook

A web browser should now open up and display a list of the notebooks containing the challenges. Simply click on the notebook you want to get working on to open it in a new browser tab.

Good luck!

Getting help

If you run into problems, please raise an issue on the repository's issue page. We'll do our best to help if we can!

Further information

See the CERN@school homepage for more information and to find out how you can get involved.

This work was supported by STFC Public Engagement Fellowship grant number ST/N00101X/1.

CERN@school is a flagship programme of the Institute for Research in Schools.