Generalization of an active electronic notebook for teaching multiple programming languages

In this paper we present a generalization of the active electronic notebook, OMNotebook, for handling multiple programming languages for educational purposes. OMNotebook can be an alternative or complementary tool to the traditional teaching method with lecturing and reading textbooks. Experience shows that using such an electronic book will lead to more engagement from the students. OMNotebook can contain technical computations and text, as well as graphics. Hence it is a suitable tool for teaching, experimentation, simulation, scripting, model documentation, storage, etc. OMNotebook is part of the open source platform OpenModelica. It is already used for the course material DrModelica in teaching the Modelica language but can easily be adapted to other programming languages which is also shown in this paper. The notebook can also be adapted to other areas, such as physics, chemistry, biology, biomechanics etc., where phenomena can be illustrated by dynamic simulations within the notebook. The idea behind this paper is to show that by using a standardized interface the notebook can be extended to any computer language, i.e., being language independent. This is shown in the form of an implementation and adaptation of the notebook to support the Scheme language.