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Comment by pamelafox | Hacker News Reader

Nice generator! Parsons Puzzles are a well researched way of scaffolded learning in the CS community.

Last year when I was teaching UC Berkeley CS61A, we tried out a variant called Faded Parsons Puzzles, where the draggable code lines also have blanks and get verified via Python doctests. I made a browser-based runner for that style, for anyone who wants to easily create new Faded Parsons Puzzles.

See demo here: https://pamelafox.github.io/faded-parsons-static/index.html More background here: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2022/08/a-browser-based-runner-for...

We'll be presenting a poster about our experiment with FPPs at this year's SIGCSE.

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Woah — I spent a couple of weeks last year doing a quantitative comparison of the outcomes of students using FPPs vs ones using traditional PPs. And I’m pretty sure I emailed someone at Berkeley (last name Weinman, I think?) asking some questions about their paper on FPPs. The Internet really is a small place!

From your blog:

> If you teach a different language besides Python, it may be possible for you to get it working if there's a way to run that language in the browser.

JavaScript comes to mind as an obvious choice. In my experience, something like this would be priceless when teaching!

I think you should be able to use OP's site or the js-parsons library to make JS puzzles, if you're okay with "line-based feedback". To use Faded Parsons with JavaScript and test-based feedback, you'd need to decide the format of the tests, since JS doesn't have a built-in doctest module like Python. Once you did that, it should be straightforward enough to use it for JavaScript. Happy to help if you end up branching off my repo.

Interesting. Code Puzzle also offers the possibility to add blanks (and drop down menus), but no doctests. Maybe a new feature for the next version.

Oh nice, I didn't realize you had that capability. It looks like you're using js-parsons, which is also what we branched off. I ended up deleting the line-based grader logic in our js-parsons fork, since we only need doctest-based grading and I wanted to clean up the code, but in theory, both kinds of graders can co-exist.

I will add the doctests soon. And other languages will be supported.

The "Options" documentation is still in French when I click "Create a Puzzle", that's why I didn't realize one could add blanks/menus.

It's now in english

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