My usage of RedPen

[zsunberg]

I'm filing this issue for a few purposes:

1. to record my thoughts and impressions as a new user so that the experience can be improved if there are other users
2. to record how I plan to do things differently from AA228 These thoughts might be useful for future development.

Problems I want RedPen to solve (so that I don't need to think about them as an instructor)

• submission and status queries between client and server
• database (csv file) management
• serving a leaderboard

Things that I think I should have to define

• A function that runs on the student's machine that evaluates their submission and returns an encrypted string encoding the result.
• A function that runs on the server that takes in the encrypted result string, returns a score, and throws an exception if there are any errors.

Things I will do differently from AA228 2019

• There will be two student packages: DMUStudent and DMUStarterCode. DMUStudent will live in .julia and contain all of the submission, evaluation, and assignment helper code. DMUStarterCode will be entirely optional. They can put it anywhere and it will just contain examples for them to start with.
• There will be no workspace or submit script. It actually seems like many of the headaches come from this. Instead, I will have them just call DMUStudent.submit from julia. If they are using another language, they can use julia -e 'using DMUStudent; submit("sumission.txt", "hw2", "myemail@colorado.edu")'. They can do this from any workspace directory they want.

[rejuvyesh]

There will be no workspace or submit script. It actually seems like many of the headaches come from this. Instead, I will have them just call DMUStudent.submit from julia. If they are using another language, they can use julia -e 'using DMUStudent; submit("sumission.txt", "hw2", "myemail@colorado.edu")'. They can do this from any workspace directory they want.

It's not as simple as that on Windows I think which is why the submit scripts were useful, but @mossr can correct me.

[mossr]

I found the submit scripts to be useful so students do not have to remember how to call submit from Julia. In other words, they just have to all submit project1 email@stanford.edu from the command line. I think having both options would be fine, but keeping the submit.sh and submit.bat files is my recommendation.