I think part of the core issue here is that you want to teach others about resiliency in problem solving, while also using the tools above to solve spatial problems, and show the value it has. Giving someone a pre-configured environment I think will help to motivate students to see the power of what these tools can do, which can then fuel the desire to truly dig into how to debug and solve programming issues.
@chris.prener No worries, it was really challenging for me to find resources on how to build something like this, so it's always nice to share resources. To frame this up, think of using Docker as if you were building a recipe where you wanted only the sf package. Part of your dockerfile would include the commands from the github repo:, except you would be using Linux as the core, which would require sudo commands to install the system dependencies needed:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libudunits2-dev libgdal-dev libgeos-dev libproj-dev
What's even better is that the folks at Rocker have created a spatial pre-configured docker image, so some of this might already be built for you to use, you simply need to deploy it on a server, and give someone an IP address to connect to use it.