Brian Blais wrote: > > 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.
Crunchy Frog (now called Crunchy, as I understand). I just researched and presented on it this past weekend and was impressed with its abilities, including that of the instructor providing a doctest and the student working to write code that lets it pass. Very cool. There is not however currently any logging of progress, counts to get it right, etc. But I would imagine that would not be hard to add to the Crunchy Frog backend. It is just an HTTP proxy with some template expansion to get a Python interpreter inside the browser window. Safety -- ehh. Each Python interpreter is running inside that HTTP proxy with full access to the underlying system, as whatever user it is running as. The design is to have each student run it locally, so they can only trash their own system. However, I could imagine you could set it up to run on a private classroom server, where the attempt records would be kept, and still be safe. http://crunchy.sourceforge.net/index.html For another solution, I wonder whether you could make use of the new Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) in Python 2.5, where you convert the source of an attempt into an abstract data structure, anonymize the method/variable/class names and compare the tree against a correct solution. It would let you quickly handle those students who solved it in a conformist way, and then you'd need to manually review the rest for creatively solving it another way. ;-) But I think Crunchy is the most classroom-friendly way to quickly solve this. A weekend's work at most. -Jeff -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
