Nbgrader Create and Grade Assignment Workflow

If you are using nbgrader as a part of your workflow, these cliff notes may help you get started setting things up. This workflow represents that of the Earth Analytics Education group’s workflow. Be sure to refer back to the nbgrader documentation for the most recent and more robust nbgrader docs.

The documentation below assumes that you have already setup your nbgrader directory. TODO – add link to our documentation where that is overviewed.

Nbgrader Configuration - The Exchange Directory

Nbgrader needs a location where you can read and write files in order for the GUI based formgrader to work properly. These are simply directories that nbgrader uses to read and write files. The location of this directory can be specified in the nbgrader_config.py script which is ideally located within your nbgrader directory.

Do the following:

  1. in your nbgrader directory, create a subdirectory called tmp/exchange. The name of this directory if up to you but this name is what we use at Earth Lab.

  2. Next, find the nbgrader_config.py - it should be in your nbgrader directory already. Add the location of your exchange directory as a parameter, TODO: add example

  3. Once you have done this, launch Jupyter Notebook from your nbgrader directory. Nbgrader assumes that you are doing th is and will look for the e xchange directory and the config files accordingly.

Once you have done this, the formgrader interface within Jupyter should work properly. You will only need to set up the above once. After it’s setup you can simply launch Jupyter Notebook from your nbgrader directory and everything should work.

TODO – this is probably a step surrounding adding students as well but i haven’t gotten here yet.

Create & Release Your Assignment

Next, create your assignment in the source directory of your nbgrader directory. For the purposes of abc-classroom, this directory is referred to as course_materials.

Then, add the assignment to the nbgrader database using:

nbgrader assignment add assignment-name-here

This step adds the assignment to the nbgrader database. This may be an optional step. TODO – more testing is needed.

At this point you are ready to work on your assignment. Test that it validates correctly. When you are happy with the assignment you can release it. We often release the assignment several times to look at the output and ensure that it looks correct.

TODO - make this below a note~

Important: if you are testing your assignment wi th a dummy submission prior to releasing it to students be careful. Once an assignment is “graded” nbgrader will not allow you to release it again. Thus a work around is to delete the assignment from the database using:

nbgrader db assignment remove assignment-name-here --force

IMPORTANT: Danger zone - you are removing an assignment using –force that may have grades in your nbgrader database. Proceed with caution if you have already graded this assignment!

TODO: BELOW CAN BE A NOTE

Note

The command line to release an assignment with a header nbgrader:

nbgrader generate_assignment assignment-name --IncludeHeaderFooter.header=source/header.ipynb --create -f

If you add the --IncludeFooter.header=source/header.ipynb it will automagically add a custom header located in the source dir called header.ipynb

Collect Student Assignments

More here on collecting

When assignments are collected they are stored in a directory structure:

student-id-1/
   assignment-1/
   assignment-2/
student-id-2/
   assignment-1/
   assignment-2/

  • if you happen to test a grading workflow and need to recreate the assignment but have already graded some

  • you will have to remove the assignment using nbgrader db assignment remove assignment-name-here

Once you have released the assignment ou can share it with the students using GitHub Classroom

TODO: add workflow here about the GitHub classroom piece

  1. next collect the assignments from GitHub classroom

TODO: link here to that page

Finally grade

Once you have collected your assignments you can begin grading. To do this go into the formgrader and select the autograde button.

<- The thunderbolt icon

If all goes well points will be assigned to each cell. You can go back into the manual grader then to add comments and manually grade any items.

Notebook Design

a cell with autograded answer is completely wiped clean and replace with a notimplemented(). * thus any imports or things that you need in the notebook need to be within the test cells

it appears as if anything in the test cells is available to the autograder. we need to do more testing on this!!

previous

Create A New Assignment Template GitHub Repository

next

Collect & Grade Assignments