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implement support for "units" in Test input and output

Open ciscorucinski opened this issue 7 years ago • 0 comments
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Issue

It appears that there might be issues within the Problem section in terms of the Input and possibly output windows. The possible issue comes from the students understanding what each line of the input and output represent...as not everyone is fluent in English.

Solution

Provide a mechanism for each problem set that indicates what each input and output represents. Or at the very least those problem sets that might cause a student to pause or stop their train of thought.

Idea 1

Expand the Problem Statement to more clearly indicate what each input and output represents. This appears to be the easiest solution; however, it pushes the code window down farther and is more text to read.

Idea 2

Create a new section that displays when the user hovers over a question-mark like icon near the input and output windows. This is more work to implement but can provide a clearer indication of what each input and output are.

Idea 3

Allow for displaying the input and comment-like representation in the input and output windows. At least for the Tests. There are no extra displays to implement, but it would require reworking the internals I believe.

Next to the Run Test #1 button, instead of it displaying

Input:

1 1 1 2 2 2

Output:

3661

It would display the something like the following...

Input:

1    # hour - time 1
1    # minute - time 1
1    # second - time 1
2    # hour - time 2
2    # minute - time 2
2    # second - time 2

Output:

3661    # difference in seconds

Example

If you look at the input for the Two Timestamps Problem Set that is part of the subscription in Lesson 1. There are 6 unlabeled inputs and 1 unlabeled output. By reading the problem statement, you should be able to figure out what each input means, but some problems that are harder than others.

New students might think it is second1, minute1, hour1, second2, minute2, hour2 (That seems reasonable). Or they might think it is hour1, hour2, minute1, minute2, second1, or maybe something else.

Side Note

This could also allow students to create better variable names. Again, not everyone is fluent in English and pulling out the correct information from an English sentence can be hard sometimes.

ciscorucinski avatar Dec 31 '17 11:12 ciscorucinski