Not sure about "real science" but it's very convenient for our students. We usually setup a notebook per group for ML-related group projects on our GPU server and also set up notebooks for thesis work etc.
Advantages...no setup on the students side (+they get reliable compute remotely) and we can prepare notebooks highlighting certain concepts. Text cells are usefull for explaining stuff so they can work through some notebooks by themselves.
Students can also easily share notebooks with us if they have any questions/issues.
I also use notebooks for data exploration, training initial test models etc. etc. Very useful. I'd say >50% of my ML related work gets done in notebooks.
Advantages...no setup on the students side (+they get reliable compute remotely) and we can prepare notebooks highlighting certain concepts. Text cells are usefull for explaining stuff so they can work through some notebooks by themselves. Students can also easily share notebooks with us if they have any questions/issues.
I also use notebooks for data exploration, training initial test models etc. etc. Very useful. I'd say >50% of my ML related work gets done in notebooks.