Show HN: Codeboard.io, a web-based IDE for the classroom | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Codeboard.io, a web-based IDE for the classroom

codeboard.io

17 pointshaches5 comments

One of the developers here. We'd be happy to get feedback and answer any questions.

In particular, we'd like to know from other teachers if they

* consider the idea (web-IDE, automatic grading etc.) useful

* use other tools (which ones?) as part of their teaching efforts

in the past i have used cloud9 and nitrous.io for teaching, and i had students clone a template repo with exercises and lessons. this is awesome to me because its a much more structured way to manage projects, especially for students who haven't used git before.

one tool which i have built with my co-teachers in the past is a problem generator that tracks which concepts the user has "mastered" based on the number of problems they have solved for a given concept. we had a naive problem generator that used templated problem specs with randomly generated values: https://github.com/pftp/pftp-web/blob/master/practice/python... have you considered anything of the sort for students who want more practice?

Thanks for the feedback.

I really like the simplicity of the problem templates. And you have a nice collection there. May I ask how you displayed them to students, how students submitted their solutions and how you ran their code?

So far, we haven't focused very much on providing content (i.e. exercises) ourselves because Codeboard is mostly used to complement existing courses where the teachers already have content and exercises in mind. Codeboard just makes it much easier for them to handle submissions or e.g. integrate with an existing Moodle or edX infrastructure.

Using reference implementations - rather than tests - and having a simple way to provide hints (as you do in your templates) are features we're quite interested in. We did a bit of work on the latter recently but that stuff hasn't made it into Codeboard yet.

I'll forward your repo to some of my colleagues. Thanks again.

thanks! the problem templates are pretty simple but i think we can do better now :) as you progress through the concepts, we introduce more challenging problems.

we used http://www.skulpt.org/ to run python in the browser. i resurrected the site to get some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/xbpat

i would love to chat some more about your ideas, you can email me at hurshal.patel/berkeley/edu

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