Let us create a new community for Teachers of Ladybug Tools

Hi community,

I was fortunate enough to get a seat at the last weeks workshop of Ladybug Tools in Copenhagen with Chris and Mostapha. Thanks to both of you for the great job you are doing with the tools, the forum and especially the teaching of the tools! Unfortunately, they can not come and teach all of us in our companies and universities, this is why many of us are (trying) to educate others or themselves on the use of the tools.

I was talking to Mostapha, about creating a forum or a community connected to a database of people who teach Ladybug Tools, both in the academic as well as the commercial context, which I would really appreciate. Since Mostapha and Chris are sharing their tools for free, I think it would be great if all those who write tutorials, presentations and scripts to teach the software use would share their work.

On top, it would be awesome, to have a direct exchange between those who are educating others in the software use.

Therefore, I am more than grateful for all suggestions on how to deal with these topics. So if anybody has an idea on how to establish a platform for teachers, please leave a comment.
I also hope, that this matter addresses many of you out there, which should be a compliment given back to Chris and Mostapha and all the others for doing such an excellent work on the tools!

Thanks for any kind of contribution in advance!

/Jonas

@Jonas

I like this idea! Does it need to be a separate forum? Why not just use this forum and differentiate “educational” posts through a different tag like “ladybug-curriculum” or something like that. This forum already gets into quite detailed discussions, and breakdowns about environmental, or building science concepts so I think it’s actually quite convenient to have both side by side.

For what it’s worth I think it would be cool if Ladybug/Grasshopper was used similar to the way the Jupyter/Python has been adopted by the scientific community. Specifically, the way code snippets are inserted into a typical educational text, as a way for students to interact and more foundationally understand math/science concepts. Here’s an example of what I mean: https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/A-gallery-of-interesting-Jupyter-Notebooks . Essentially using LB tools to teach energy/environmental concepts, and not just as a way to teach the software. (To be fair, I think some of the LB Hydra scripts are already doing this).

S

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I concur with @SaeranVasanthakumar. We already have a category on the forum to share such content.

Hi @Jonas, Thank you for starting the thread and thank you @SaeranVasanthakumar and @devang for your input. Here are my random, jet-lagged thoughts:

I agree that we already have sample files (mostly on Hydra) and category for sharing but I see this more of an idea for sharing knowledge and experience from teaching Ladybug Tools. We need more Notebook-like posts that are going step by step through the process and point out Why behind What is put together inside the script. That is something that can/should be addressed in the new version of Hydra. Hydra should be more flexible in term of style.

It can also be helpful to have them in a separate category where we can establish a peer review process and learn from each other. That was originally the idea behind the Institutional Partnership by reviewing syllabus and related teaching materials but again it will be much better if this can be part of what the community of educators do and in a larger scale than being done by @chris and I and for a couple of institutes.

@sarith has raised the concern for not having some official, peer reviewed, cross-checked teaching/reference materials for Ladybug Tools to me several times and I think is very valid. This initiative might help to address part of that problem. I should add that once you know your way through Grasshopper and Ladybug Tools there is more than enough materials to support one for learning/teaching the tools but before that it can be really be painful. It is worst when it comes to advanced topics. For instance, and I am to blame here, if one wants to learn about the core concepts behind honeybee[+] for daylight simulation, they should either read +100 pages of documents or find several pieces of information all over the forum and GitHub. There should be better ways to do this.

I’m looking forward to hear more from both experienced teachers as well as younger educators about this topic. Thanks in advance.

cc: @AbrahamYezioro, @MichaelDonn, @IasonBournas, @Grasshope, @TheodorosGalanos @Byron and many more who I can’t remember right now. :dizzy_face:

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I believe the necessary readings (documentation) of the simulation engines that LB tools connect with, cover this extensively. Sure one needs to go to a few places to create a good foundation for oneself. But I think the efforts are worth the time. And most of these necessary readings are free and quickly accessible.

I understand this and I am going through this like everyone. I think of this as pre-requisite and something one needs to do eventually. I find this situation to be very similar to a lot of situations in life. “If you believe you should know / learn something, eventually you’ll have to know/ learn it.” One example would be, personal finance.

Lastly, :tea:.

Hi all,

this is a really good initiative, both for helping novices and for keeping the LB/HB well documented, as many practitioners don’t “trust” software that they think is undocumented.

From my teaching experience, (hello @Jonas ) i have seen four levels regarding this:

  1. The way to connect components in a functioning script.
    This can already be shown with Hydra examples.

  2. Description texts when hovering over (e.g. look at the difference between Annual Daylight simulation and Thermal Autonomy analysis). (@chris is better at this, sorry @mostapha :slight_smile:). This is where LB/HB should be pointing to the right direction. Crucial to these descriptions are the links to related research and publications/documentation.

  3. Tutorials on distinct tasks.
    I am sure people need it. We could make a list of what these tutorials could be and i agree with @sarith about cross-check peer-reviewing them. Pick a standard format and have them all together in another Hydra (Learnea :slight_smile:)

  4. Error messages. The component is red/orange, but what does that text “solution exception object has no attribute split” mean? Maybe have a list of “common” error codes that we have seen so far.

This one is because of poor error handling in the legacy version which has been addressed in [+]. I would leave that out for now.

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Sure! After all, the (+) is the future if i am not mistaken.

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cc @KitElsworth

Great list. I’d like to propose an additional level:

5. When and Why to use the modeling method.
This answers questions like: When do you need to conduct a THERM analysis to get a U-Value calculation, and when is it appropriate to just use a back-of-envelope series calculation? When is it appropriate to abstract a large building into single representative thermal zone, and when is it appropriate to break it into multiple zones? Do we need to use WUFI to check condensation potential or do should we just consult a psychometric chart?

A lot of questions on these forums are actually caused by users asking the wrong questions, and giving guidance on when and why we are using these modeling methods I think would go a long way towards nurturing the community.

I have a couple of more ideas that I’ll try and get to after work.

S

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Hi all,
thanks for all your replies and sorry that I kept silent for quite some time!

I really want to highlight the two points out of the discussion that I think they need to be addressed to (thanks to @IasonBournas and @SaeranVasanthakumar ) :

From a student perspective and someone who´s keen on figuring out ways of simulating things on their own, the point that @IasonBournas made with the tutorials is not well addressed yet. It would be nice if there would be a community in its own environment that would produce tutorials which get reviewed by other users and are being shared globally. So I would like if more people would share their thoughts on that. My opinion is, that for creating tutorials along with scripts there should be guidlines on the layout and so on. In case one uses them for teaching, they will always follow the same approach and start of at a simple point. This could be an extended version of @chris’s YouTube tutorials, where one can start with the simpliest tutorial and is being introduced over time. Even the number of users can be increased by developing a written tutorial that is more comprehensive.

Also @SaeranVasanthakumar’s point regarding, that users have to be able to understand when and why they have to use another method to get more accurate results, or how a script can be improved or simplified would be a major improvement to the usability! In that point I can only say that I like the idea, but have no idea on how to approach something like that. I´m sure there are some people around who can give an input to this!

/Jonas

Hello, I really like this initiavie, I think this is an appropriate place, here within Ladybug Tools, maybe with its own category.
I agree the background to start with BEM (building energy modeling) could be overwhelming. I have a question regarding to this matter for those who have already taught it. I know its necessary a theoretical introduction to BEM, Thermodynamics… … At this moment I am preparing some proposals to teach BEM with LBHB and I thought the theory could be paired with the workshops to avoid exhausting theorical sessions. Maybe two projectors: one for the workshop itself, other for theory. The question is what you think about this?

Thanks !

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Hi Juan,

sorry for the late answer, unfortunately nothing has progressed in the direction of creating a platform for tutorials. I experienced on my own, that it is a very time consuming task to come up with simple but high quality tutorials, therefore I am missing time to proceed anything regarding a first comprehensive tutorial at the moment.

One really good development that I am following, is the Honeybee wiki created by Alexander Matthias Jacobson, available here:

I guess pairing something with the workshop videos available for patrons, institutional partners and industrial partners makes a lot of sense, and the introduction into BEM and Thermodynamics is a nice add-on even though it is a little bit out of the scope of this community.

If you come up with some tutorials or anything else, I am sure that the people who contributed above are a good crowd to ask for a peer review of your documents.

Hope I answered your questions!
/Jonas

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Thank you @Jonas
The Honeybee wiki is a very good resource I missed.
I think its difficult a platform for teaching LBHB but maybe a social group could be the site for sharing, compare and feedback teaching material. I see you are looking for the right workflow or tutorial to teach, about this I could say the Hydra examples are very good to start because the are simplified and cover many examples, however, the difference about teaching with this could be the complementary information that a teacher gives to the students. The explanations and the “following procces” could be the difference. This example can be compared with @mostapha ´s tutorials for daylight.
jP

All, As you already know @amjacobson has started writing the tutorials for energy modeling with Honeybee and he has officially released them today:

This is a major contribution and should make the process of creating resources easier. Now that we have a starting point I suggest to start thinking about what you would need for your course which is missing from the wiki and add that specific part as your contribution. We can find the best place for each contribution as we go.

Let me know your thoughts.

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