teaching and self-evaluation

[Alexandre Rademaker]

Hi,

I am planning to use Racket this semester for a course on introduction to programming that I will be teaching (first year of undergrad). The idea is to propose weekly projects for the students. Does anyone have experience and insights into environments for administrating this workflow? I need

1. A project is published with a skeleton with functions to be filled with code
2. some test cases already visible for the students
3. 1-2 test cases are not visible for the students
4. the student submit the project with the changes in the code (filling the blanks)
5. the system execute and give the feedback
6. some simple way to summarize the results per project

GitHub Classroom with Travis is an option. Jupiter Notebook using Racket kernel is another (assuming Jupiter universe has some support for assignments like https://cocosci.princeton.edu/papers/jupyter.pdf or https://www.jupitered.com/). Does anyone have something to share about it?

I would prefer open source solutions.

Best,
Alexandre

[Sean Bailey]

Hi, Alexandre,

I’ve used Jupyter notebooks and electronic submissions for a Python programming course, however, we ‘rolled our own’ auto-grader for certain assignments. The notebook format is, in my opinion, ideal for teaching programming and assigning exercises and projects.

The Racket kernel for Jupyter was intuitive to install/set up on my local machine, but I’d advise for a large class, if you have the resources, setting up a Jupyter Lab instance on a server and allowing students to log into that, rather than troubleshooting each individual setup. (This, of course, depends on the size of the class; my sections have all been ~40, for a total enrollment of ~160/semester.) 

Using GitHub with Jupyter is a good combination; GitHub has web-based previews of Jupyter notebooks which allow for reading (no execution) without having to download or run Jupyter locally most of the time. 

We’ve been using Jupyter notebooks with GitHub Classroom

I’ll also call your attention to nbgitpuller (https://github.com/jupyterhub/nbgitpuller), which makes distributing notebooks and code incredibly easy at scale.

Best,

Sean Bailey

University of Pittsburgh

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/1d4c747d-120a-4406-af12-0b7ed02d1149%40googlegroups.com.

[James Platt]

I'm working on some GUI code and I am seeing some glitches with keyboard shortcuts in popup menus. I wonder if others are seeing the same things.

In Racket 7.5 on macOS 10.11.6 "El Captian":
Shortcuts defined in a menu-item% in a popup menu don't work unless the popup menu is displayed. In other words, you have to right click first and then the shortcut will work while the menu is open. This isn't a big deal if you are working according to Apple's human interface guidelines because all items in popup menus are also supposed to be in the main menu bar [1]. Still, it seems like this should work on it's own.

In Racket 7.5 on Linux Mint 19.1 (Racket installed with the Ubuntu PPA):
The shortcuts don't work at all, whether the popup is displayed or not. Also a keyboard shortcut defined with '#\backspace' does not display in the popup. This is supposed to be ctl-backspace on Linux and Windows and command-delete on macOS. The macOS version works but not the Linux version. I haven't tested with Windows.

James

[1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/menus/contextual-menus/

[George Neuner]

On 1/22/2020 4:44 PM, James Platt wrote:
> I'm working on some GUI code and I am seeing some glitches with keyboard shortcuts in popup menus. I wonder if others are seeing the same things.
>
> In Racket 7.5 on macOS 10.11.6 "El Captian":
> Shortcuts defined in a menu-item% in a popup menu don't work unless the popup menu is displayed. In other words, you have to right click first and then the shortcut will work while the menu is open. This isn't a big deal if you are working according to Apple's human interface guidelines because all items in popup menus are also supposed to be in the main menu bar [1]. Still, it seems like this should work on it's own.

It's pretty standard across platforms for popup windows (any kind) to
become inactive when they are hidden.  In most windowing systems it is
possible to override that behavior and keep a window active even when
not shown, but I haven't worked with Macs since MultiFinder so I can't
guide you as to how to do it there.

> In Racket 7.5 on Linux Mint 19.1 (Racket installed with the Ubuntu PPA):
> The shortcuts don't work at all, whether the popup is displayed or not. Also a keyboard shortcut defined with '#\backspace' does not display in the popup. This is supposed to be ctl-backspace on Linux and Windows and command-delete on macOS. The macOS version works but not the Linux version. I haven't tested with Windows.

This sounds like a bug.


> James
>
> [1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/menus/contextual-menus/

George

[James Platt]

Thanks. I guess the point of having keyboard shortcuts in popup menus is just to display them to remind the user what they are. At this point, I plan to follow the practice of having everything from the popups also in a main menu bar in every platform. So really, the glitch failing to display a '#\backspace' shortcut in Linux is the serious one in terms of practicality.