[Edu-sig] Crunchy features!

[Jeff Rush]

Johannes Woolard wrote:
> 
> Anyways, I'm off to Germany in a couple of days to visit grandparents
> - and so will have far too much spare time to devote to Python coding
> and other such forms of enjoyment. I'll be there for 10 days and
> wanted to implement some worthwhile feature for Crunchy: The problem
> is, I can't decide what - so I though I would ask you guys what you
> want to see in there... I assume (from your responses on this list)
> that at least a few of you have tried Crunchy and have ideas for it's
> future development.
> 
> A couple of people have suggested/endorsed the idea of having some way
> of centrally collating doctest results from a group of students and
> giving students a way to hand in work through crunchy. This would take
> the form of a seperate server that would simply receive doctest
> results from clients and spew out statistics. It would also enable
> markers to view code, created by studnts in crunchy, from a
> centralized repository - even after the students have logged off and
> gone home. That's one idea.

I'd vote for the separate 'classroom' server, that acts as a repository of 
results of some type, as well as a secure user id/auth facility.  Use of it 
should be kept optional but in some cases you do need users to log in.

Functionality of classroom server:

1. user id/auth
2. marked-up log of student activity, tied to their id.  At least timestamp 
each action taken per question/position, and the Python source they submitted.
3. The markup should be such that programs can be written to scan it and 
generate reports, such as a list of start/duration of each session, per student.
4. 'Save' button perhaps on each source workarea, such that when hit the 
Python source is stored on the classroom server and brought back the next time 
the page is displayed by that particular student.
5. 'Publish' button that saves a permanent copy of the source as a submission 
to the teacher.  The idea is that 'Save' means the student has gone home for 
the day and might continue work when he returns, while 'Publish' means he is 
finished with the task.

Getting fancier, providing some management features for teachers:

6. be able to group login accounts into 'classes'
7. provide a 'grid' display for teachers, so that can see a list of class 
names with some stats/color indicators of student activity, and click on one 
and see how many students have completed results and also how far they've 
gotten at all through the lessons.  Imagine a bar graph of lessons/pages 
across the bottom, with the height of each bar indicating how many students 
have reached those lessons at all, and also have completed them successfully.

Just some ideas, some of which may be too ambitious.

-Jeff