Bryan Weber - Distributing and Collecting Jupyter Notebooks for Manual Grading| JupyterCon 2020

Brief Summary Using an autograding system with Jupyter Notebooks for independent student work requires the instructor to identify multiple possible solutions for a problem and still requires manual assignment of partial credit. This is often a challenge, particularly in disciplines like thermodynamics. In this talk, I will demonstrate a pair of Python packages to generate, distribute, and collect Notebooks. Outline Jupyter Notebooks are often used as the format for independent assignments for students, as homework or exam problems. In many disciplines, the use of autograding is convenient, and dramatically simplifies the task of grading for the instructor. However, autograding has three main disadvantages: The instructor must identify multiple solutions to the problem as test cases Students must write more complicated code, i.e., functions Giving partial credit for a problem still requires manual intervention In my experience teaching thermodynamics for engineering students, identifying multiple solutions for a problem may be challenging. For many problems in thermodynamics, the behavior and solution procedure of the problem changes dramatically if the input conditions are changed. Thus, for the courses I teach, identifying multiple solutions is usually not feasible. In addition, many non-computer-science engineering students are not very comfortable writing more complicated code, such as functions. The use of coding to solve problems is already a significant cognitive overhead, and if the additional requirement to write functions for the autograder was removed, that would be a benefit for many students. Finally, assigning partial credit to problems is expected by many students, when their approach to a problem’s solution is appropriate, but they make a small error along the way and don’t get the blessed answer. This must be done manually, even in an autograding system. The combination of these three factors has led me to pursue an alternate method of generatin