Title: Add a peer help plugin for each coding problem

[chensivan]

We propose adding a peer help plugin for each problem on Runestone so students can request help when they encounter difficulty in solving programming problems.

In particular, there are two major features of this plugin.

Creating a help session

Students can click the “Help” button above each code editor to initialize a help request. They will be able to add a description of their request. Both the description and their code will be submitted to a help session list that everyone can see.

Interacting with existing help sessions

Students can navigate any existing help sessions (a list on the side of each code editor) to see the problem related discussions. Clicking each session will replace the student’s code with the requester’s code in the editor, and the student can join the discussion.

Implementation: We plan to implement these features using ShareDB which we will run a shareDB server for now.

[bnmnetp]

I love this idea, in theory, but I have a lot of questions.

Who will be allowed to help a student? Anyone? Only people in the same class? I think this aspect of it is fraught with peril, especially when we are talking about classes that are comprised of high school students.

Is this synchronous in that both parties have to be online at the same time? Or async?

What kinds of privacy protections are you thinking about? Our terms of service say that we will not reveal PII to 3rd parties.

I think protecting student privacy, and protecting students from predators needs to be part of this plan.

Do you have any idea how much additional hardware will be needed to use sharedb?