zoomoid/assignments

Preamble

Hand-in assignments are a common thing among computer science courses at University. So much so, that there's enough pain with academia using LaTeX for anything and everything and the creation of third-party tooling for making working with LaTeX a little bit less painful is justified.

Over the course of several semesters, I've written a lot of LaTeX code and read even more documentation and had my fair share of experience with building more and more complex things, foremost a library of LaTeX document classes and packages for all sorts of stuff: https://github.com/zoomoid/alphabetclasses.

Several of these macros and packages only ever experienced one iteration, and where immediately superseeded by another class or package. Finally, after years of iterating over which macros where essential and designing a layout for assignments that was generally accepted, csassignments was created.

csassigments.cls

csassignments brings several macros for working on at least Computer Science assignments, but you can always add more functionality. For more details, consider the classes' documentation, either from source (TeXDoc) or online on CTAN (https://www.ctan.org/pkg/csassignments).

Use it either in the document's root directory, or add it to your personal texmf directory:

\documentclass{csassignments}

\course{} % course will replace title in maketitle
\sheet{} % adds a sheet identifier, automatically prefixed with "Exercise Sheet"
\group{} % group works like a subtitle
\member[]{} % members are like authors, but with a separation into ID, name, and surname
\due{} % add a due date, automatically prefixed with "Handed in on"

\begin{document}
\maketitle % makes the documents header
\gradingtable % adds a grading table between title and exercises

\exercise[<points>]{<title>} % add an exercise

\subexercise[<points>]{<subtitle>} % add a subexercise
% (points are ignored, only top-level exercise points are added up to sum in grading table)

\end{document}

Prerequisites for LaTeX

To compile your assignments, you'll have to have access to your local LaTeX installation to install packages. Depending on your TeX distribution and operating system, this varies, also whether you install packages locally or system-wide.

To reduce comlexity for all those different deployment methods, we push installing the LaTeX class down to your TeX distro:

1. MikTeX: You won't need to do anything, MikTeX will download the class from your closest CTAN mirror. You might have to confirm installing the class
2. TeXLive: If something different to texlive-full is installed on your system, run tlmgr install csassignments to install the class for your user's TeX installation
3. Other distros: Follow a guide on how to install packages.

If you don't require building the assignments (simply because you can flawlessly write TeX code) or chose to run LaTeX in a container (e.g. miktex/miktex), the installation is either the same as if you run from the host system, or you use the container image provided from this repository:

Depending on your container runtime, you might have to adjust some of the command's arguments

# Run a bash inside the container to build your assignments with LaTeX directly
#
# On UNIX
$ docker run -ti -v $(pwd):/work ghcr.io/zoomoid/assignments bash
# In PowerShell for Windows users
$ docker run -ti -v ${PWD}:/work ghcr.io/zoomoid/assignments bash

The image is Ubuntu-based, and installs the most recent version of MikTeX available. MikTeX will then install the csassignments class on-demand.

If you'd like to cache the installed packages for later use again, provide an additional (anonymous) volume for the installation path of MikTeX: -v miktex:/miktex/.miktex.

Installation and Usage of assignmentctl

To learn more about the CLI that accompanies this project's LaTeX class, see ./cli.

For information about the older version of this tool, see ./pyassignmentctl.

Usage with CI Pipelines

For details on how to use this project in Continuous Integration pipelines, see ./ci.

Epilogue: The "Why" of assignmentctl

To make collaboration easier and enable templating and automation of as much as possible, in particular considering a weekly/bi-weekly schedule of assignments per-course, we built several tools for helping with that.

1. CI pipelines: Leveraging the advantages of CI in the context of building assignment PDFs from source seemed only logical: It introduces reproducability and also, not everyone needs to install a fully-blown TeX toolchain into their system. Rather, with things such as containers, we can delegate building entirely to disposable containers, that run the build and export the PDF as artifacts from the pipeline (One might even say that the only purpose of all this effort was alleviating the need for a TeX toolchain on my personal system entirely).
2. Easily template repeating code: The scaffolding essentially is required every week again. Instead of copying the source files and manually adjusting the parameters to fit the current assignment, having tools that generate the source files automatically reduces friction and mistakes that occur from copy-pasting over and over again. A single command is ideally all you need to start on a new assignment. Also it allows us to enforce a repeating structure for the directories of the assignments. Further downstream, we can then leverage the repeating structure to run further automation
3. Automatic bundling of assignment and additional files: If an assignment requires more than just a single PDF, e.g., code, using the fixed structure of the file system allows for bundling, again, with a single command. With assignmentctl, we automatically create archives from the CLI and can immediately upload these to the submission platform.
4. Integration into Git/VCS workflow: We can leverage versioning systems such as tags to mark exercises as being done and trigger particular actions on the final iteration output.

This resulted in building the first CLI for handling assignment templating, building, and bundling. It was written in Python, as a singular script.