[Edu-sig] Interactive tutorial

[Chris Meyers]

Brent and Jeff,

  Your ideas here are great. Running on the server would give a lot 
of great feedback on usage, problems, hard bits, etc. I can imagine 
the book being continuously tuned with ever better examples and 
explanations. If this flies I would love to include my "Python for 
Fun" case studies in the same format. This could work best if the 
evaluator did a sequence of statements/expressions.

Or could the cgi keep track of the users with a cookie or readonly 
form field and "shelve" their namespace between calls? So that they 
could submit a single statement or expression at a time? Details, 
details.

I think we could have file I/O included by automatically importing 
an "open" class that looks just like files except they only work in 
a designated directory and let you write only so much stuff.

Chris

06/08/2001 5:33:12 PM, Jeffrey Elkner <jeff@elkner.net> wrote:

>This is way too cool!!  I like the idea of
>www.python.org/cgi-bin/eval/python<version>, but if that isn't
>practical, Yorktown High School (as one of the major beneficiaries 
of
>this project ;-) would be glad to donate a server to it.  Just let 
me
>know.
>
>jeff elkner
>yorktown high school
>arlington, va
>
>On 08 Jun 2001 10:33:59 -0700, Brent Burley wrote:
>> Chris Meyers wrote:
>> > Here's an idea. How about a cgi web page that delivers the
>> > explanations and maybe the code that needs correcting. The cgi
>> > program is written in Python of course. It would take the 
users
>> > correction and "eval" it, returning either the answer or an 
error
>> > message (capturing any errors traps and stdout). That way 
people
>> > could play with Python without actually going thru the 
installation
>> > process.
>> 
>> I like that idea.  How about this variation:
>> 
>> The lesson text is an ordinary html doc.  In fact, Jeff's text 
could be
>> used as is; it would merely be augmented with a bunch of "try 
it" links
>> (a little icon of some sort would be nice).  These would be 
linked to
>> exercises that would come up in a frame below the main document.  
These
>> forms could have anything in them, but would at a minimum have a 
text
>> area initialized with a python code fragment and an <Evaluate> 
button
>> which would evaluate the code and place the results in the same 
frame. 
>> If you make a mistake, just click the back button, edit, and
>> re-evaluate.
>> 
>> The python evaluation would be done by a server which could be 
running
>> anywhere, even on the local machine.  How about a server that's 
running
>> on the teacher's machine?  It could write to a log window every 
time a
>> student submits some code so the teacher can see how everyone is 
doing. 
>> The public python server could be useful for other purposes as 
well.  It
>> could for example provide access to a number of different python
>> versions to allow people to try out new features, compare 
performance,
>> etc., without having to download and install anything.
>> 
>> I'm not sure how to deal with the fact that the url for the 
python eval
>> server needs to be hard-coded into the lesson forms.  If there 
were a
>> well-known, reliable server, hard-coding the url might not be so 
bad. 
>> Anyone have any ideas on how to make the server url 
configurable?
>> 
>> Any volunteers for running the python eval server?  How about
>> www.python.org/cgi-bin/eval/python<version> ;-) ?
>> 
>> 	Brent
>> 
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