SIParCS 2025 - Christian Okyere

Reimagining Python Education for Geoscience: Lessons from Project Pythia's Modernization

Recorded Talk

Project Pythia is an open-source, community-driven initiative that provides comprehensive Python training resources for the geoscience community. Its content spans foundational programming tutorials to domain-specific workflows (Cookbooks) delivered through JupyterBooks.

With the upcoming release of JupyterBook 2, built on MyST Markdown, Project Pythia faced the challenge of migrating its materials (spanning 60-70 GitHub repositories, each with around 12 configuration files) from a legacy Sphinx-based system. The previous approach required duplicating configuration changes (navigation, footers, JupyterHub links) across every repo, eventually leading to siloed maintenance burdens as team members rotated through the open-source project. This transition, referred to internally as “Mystifification,” was essential to maintain compatibility, centralize configurations, and leverage modern publishing workflows that support interactivity and documentation standards.

This project focused on modernizing Pythia’s infrastructure to support this migration while serving as early testers of JupyterBook 2, which remains in the alpha development stage. Our team held two sprint days dedicated to converting repos and resolving issues. Key activities included refactoring repositories to MyST Markdown syntax, redesigning configurations for easier inheritance, and updating 60+ repos to work with the CI workflows for automated builds. The work also documented legacy issues, and proposed solutions for future functionality (such as footer extensions, gallery filtering, and native blog post support). The migration process was then documented as a series of contribution guides.

Project Pythia now provides a more robust, sustainable platform for teaching Python to geoscientists, ensuring its resources remain accessible and maintainable for a growing global user base.

Mentors: Julia Kent, Orhan Eroglu, Drew Cameron

Slides and poster