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Re: New Virtual Programming Lab (VPL) module

by Andrei Băutu -
Number of replies: 2
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Hello everyone,

I'm considering using VPL in a introductory course to programming. In each week, I have a few simple programming exercises for students (between 4-8 small problems). Right now, I'm using one assignment per week (students upload multiple files). I'm considering switching to VPL, but I'm wondering if there is a way to group multiple problem statements into a single VPL activity. Some reasons for doing this are:

-  to have the problems for each week grouped into a single "unit" so that they are not all showed in the course page;

- to have one grade per week (instead of having grades for each problem).

I believe I might be able to get this done via vpl_execution script, but I'm wondering if someone did this already. Or maybe you can suggest an alternative to have the VPL assignments for each week grouped into a single "unit" (something like pages in a book resource).

Thanks.

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In reply to Andrei Băutu

Re: New Virtual Programming Lab (VPL) module

by Charlie Daly -

Hi Andrei,

I realise that you have probably already resolved this issue, but it is almost exactly what I faced when I used VPL for a programming module. I changed the course view (under course settings) so that there was one topic per page. Now, I might have 20 VPL  exercises per topic but now it is more manageable as students can see just one topic. Each topic is usually split into 4 sections: lecture, quiz, lab and resources. The lecture contains notes and possibly a video. The quiz uses an activequiz module to cover lecture topics. The lab is where I store the VPL exercises and resources are just for any external resources which might be interesting.

As for grades, I use Moodle grade categories and create a category for each week and all VPL exercises go into that category so that students can see the mark for each week.

Charlie

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In reply to Charlie Daly

Re: New Virtual Programming Lab (VPL) module

by Andrei Băutu -
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Thank you, Charlie. I'll test that approach. 

For now, what I come up with is CodeRunner. It's a quiz question type, but I use it for lab classes, too. To do that, for each lab class I create a lab "quiz" which has 5-6 fixed CodeRunner questions (they are the assignment for that week). I disable question shuffling, enable regular page blocks, and allow students to test the solutions any number of times before submitting.

I can add descriptive texts between questions with guidelines for what's next, I can mix programming assignments with other type of questions, and I can display all questions in one page, or grouped questions by categories (eg. introductory, lab work, homework), or one question per page.

The disadvantage of CodeRunner is that it has less features and allows less customizations than VPL (it doesn't allow custom evaluation scripts, doesn't have similarity test, etc). This is also an advantage, as I found it easier to setup and work with. I also like it because I can then use same tool for exams (in which case I'll use random questions and shuffling).

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