Hello Brian, I do not teach (much to my regrets) but I have been thinking about what you describe. See below. On 12/14/06, Brian Blais < bblais@bryant.edu> wrote:
Hello,
I have a couple of classes where I teach introductory programming using Python. What I would love to have is for the students to go through a lot of very small programs, to learn the basic programming structure. Things like, return the maximum in a list, making lists with certain patterns, very simple string parsing, etc. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time to grade such things by hand, so I would like to automate it as much as possible.
I envision a number of possible solutions. In one solution, I provide a
function template with a docstring, and they have to fill it in to past a doctest. Is there a good (and safe) way to do that online? Something like having a student post code, and the doctest returns. I'd love to allow them to submit until they get it, logging each attempt.
I may have a partial solution. I (co-)wrote a program called Crunchy (crunchy.sf.net) which, among other features, allow automated correction of code that has to satisfy a given docstring. As it stands, it only allows self-evaluation i.e. there's no login required nor is the solution forwarded to someone else. (This has been requested by others and may, eventually, be incorporated in Crunchy.) So, as a tool for learning, it's working; the grading component is simply not there. However, the code is open-source and you could adopt it to your needs ;-) André Or perhaps there is a better way to do this sort of thing. How do others
who teach Python handle this?
thanks,
Brian Blais
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