Cumulative Assignments

Simple assignments have starter code, a task, and a deadline. This works in simple cases, but a lot of classes use assignments to cumulatively build a larger application, introducing new concepts each week. Classroom doesn't support this at all, new tasks cannot be pushed by teacher, and an assignment cannot have multiple deadlines. The typical workaround is one assignment that doesn't use deadlines where the teacher shares tasks to be done in another repo (or in the LMS).

Cumulative assignments would include:

• Multiple deadlines / milestones
  • Teachers should be able to view each repo at the time of each submission date
• New tasks released at each deadline
• Feedback from teachers / CI after each deadline

And possibly more.

It's possible we could support this by beefing up the current version of assignments, and not creating a new "type" of assignment.

I solve this by giving students reference code to earlier weeks. So in week N, they get a starter repo with a solution to the assignment for week N-1.

In one case, where I had multiple deadlines sharing a common repo, I instructed the students to tag the commit they wished to submit for the first deadline.