Summer 2022

Summer time is often when instructors of all kinds can help out with Runestone Development. Since June marks the beginning of summer I thought I would highlight what is on my list for development list for the next few months. If something sounds interesting to you then please get in touch!

PreTeXt

PreTeXt is now the official authoring language for Runestone. There are a host of reasons why this makes sense, and I’ve written about them before. It has taken some time but we have finally arrived in a place where it is a reality. I have converted our first Runestone book ever How to Think Like a Computer Scientist to PreTeXt and Rob Beezer has added markup to support our interactive elements. This is a huge step forward and we now begin a process of converting our current books. Like any conversion process it is not 100% so each book is going to take some manual work to perfect the conversion.

  • select questions

  • toggle questions + A/B testing
    • I think the correct way to do this moving forward is to make toggles tasks and have Runestone show the tasks as dropdown

  • Convert select books to PreTeXt for Fall 2022

  • Build APEX Calculus for Runestone

  • Build ORCCA for Runestone

  • Build Yoshiwara’s Algebra book for Runestone

  • Finish up the SAGE Cell integration

  • Jaas - Jing as a service - Jing is a validator for PreTeXt

  • Make a PR to store traces with a hash of the input.

Peer + Grant Work

This work is funded by an NSF Grant for Barb Ericson at the University of Michigan.

  • Grading - 2 interaction Qs plus chat (maybe) - update autograder

  • Add async peer instruction page

  • Get tags working with question bank searching - what we really want is prereqs and reqs - add to web UI and make use of some taxonomy - someone please give me a taxonomy!

Automatically Create Parsons problems

This work is also funded by an NSF Grant for Barb Ericson!

  • Get Overcode working in python3 - this may also be a good task for Celery

  • Generate parson’s problems from the selected

Github Integration for Custom books

This work is funded by a grant from Elliot Houser and UT Austin.

  • Add simple interface to connect a Repository

  • Add simple interface to publish draft/published

  • Integrate the web hooks to auto build when pushed - this may be a separate server

Runestone Internal Projects

  • Updates to student progress page - replacing d3 stuff with pandas

  • Allow instructors to download LARGE classes on their own - using a celery task with an email followup - maybe create a special role for trusted teachers / researchers to allow them access
    • celery could also be used to do build on demand of Runestone / PreTeXt books

  • Finish redoing the login process

  • prototype an author/researcher dashboard

  • Convert other books

  • Does PreTeXt support hidden pages? Somehow we will need a workaround for how barb has been adding problems to the database but not on a page that is linked to a TOC

  • Create a bibtex file with references and generate a web page of references from that.