Go Code It

Another quick post. I’ve been working to improve the framework and parsons problems in the light of the new T2C problems being added. I now have a working solution for a first pass upgrade. This is not the finished product but should offer a slightly better experience than is currently offered.

I have a few more fixes to implement to make this as workable as it can be but I will also need to make some back end changes to some of the solutions to take advantage of the new parsons framework.

I am holding back on publishing until the weekend as I want to be certain that when it gets pushed to the site, it won’t impact your work in schools.

You will notice a couple of improvements for now:

1. The drag and drop is a little more intuitive
2. There is some syntax highlighting
3. You now have blocks to select on the left and build the solution on the right
4. If the problem is solved but then ‘unsolved’ the block colours will reset
5. The first block in the solution which is found in the incorrect position will be highlighted to give students a hint on how to get to the final solution.

Some additional things you may not notice but are in place:

1. Occasionally the editor would load but the framework would show the solution rather than the framework. Also occasionally the parsons problems would not load at all. I believe this should have been resolved but I welcome feedback if that is not the case. Hopefully this does not impact page load times too much.
2. Blocks can now be joined in the parsons to make bigger blocks. This will be helpful as some T2C problems were too large to solve as individual lines to be sorted. This won’t be obvious immediately and will take a bit of time to push through as it requires some changes to the back end solutions. This also means that were the order of some parts of a solution may have been ambiguous, blocks can be joined to make it easier for the student to get the correct order
3. I am also hoping that I can also ensure the order of functions is not important in checking correctness but this may not come on this pass.

I’m very keen to get these support functions working well for you all so I’ll be trying to find time to add a few more changes to them in the next few weeks as well as adding more control to your profile for these and other functions.

Hope you like the update this weekend when it rolls out.