manage group assignments

[kcranston]

In some of the EarthLab courses, there are group assignments. Each group is a GitHub Team. We won't use nbgrader for these assignments. How can we modify abc-classroom to clone group repos and push feedback?

[lwasser]

Issues related to group vs. individual repos which use gh usernames vs. team names

If the assignment is called final-project - you will have repos called final-project-*

• final-project-group-zz

Issues Associated with Not using Nbgrader

• abc-clone - we don't need to copy files over to /nbgrader/submitted - what happens when abc-clone can't find the submitted directory or if we don't need it?
• Create feedback -- doesn't exist - we won't use nbgrader to create html files. html files don't render well
• How do we push feedback - does abc-feedback just do the push to github part?
• don't have a feedback directory if we aren't using nbgrader
• i kind of want a abc-push at the end just to update the student repos

---

Maybe we have a flag on abc-clone that skips moving files over to submitted? maybe we have a flag abc-feedback that skips moving files and just does abc-push??

[kcranston]

The students create the group names, and they can use spaces. GitHub replaces spaces in the UI with '-', so "group xx" becomes "group-xx" in the team name, repo name, etc.

[kcranston]

Steps for group assignments (and how they differ from non-group assignments):

Create assignment (abc-new-template, abc-update-template)

• DIFF? currently assumes source files in course_materials/release/assignment_name dir (which might not exist if you aren't using nbgrader). Allow user to specify different source directory?
• OK: template location at template_dir/assignment-template
• OK: name of repo, assignment-template

Clone repos (abc-clone)

• DIFF: can't use existing student roster; need to provide list of teams / groups
• DIFF: repo name will be assignment_name-team_name (not assignment_name/student)
• OK: cloning into clone_dir/assignment_name
• DIFF: do not need to copy files from cloned_dir into course_materials/submitted

Feedback (abc-feedback)

• DIFF: can't use existing student roster; need to provide list of teams / groups
• DIFF: the feedback files won't be in course_materials/student/assignment_name (instead in clone_dir/assignment_name/repo_name/feedback?
• DIFF: the feedback files might not be html

[kcranston]

Implementation thoughts:

• I am tempted to create a separate set of scripts, abc-group-template, abc-group-clone, abc-group-feedback (or team instead of group?) to avoid having a huge number of command line arguments on the existing scripts
• we can re-used much of the existing implementation as long as we allow for roster, directory locations as parameters to functions
• for abc-classroom as a library, we might have python classes for assignments with different constructors for individual vs group:

assignment1 = abc.assignment(roster, assignment-name, other parameters)
assignment1.create_template()
assignment1.clone_repos()
assignment2 = abc.group_assignment(different-roster, assignment-name, other parameters)