Organize Assignments

The course_materials directory is the only course subdirectory that you need to manage yourself. We have been developing abc-classroom while using nbgrader for autograding Jupyter notebooks, so some of the necessary structure of `course_materials follows from the nbgrader requirements. It is not necessary to use nbgrader with abc-classroom, but it might be helpful to read about how nbgrader structures course files to better understand abc-classroom. We provide instructions below for both cases.

Manage Assignments Using nbgrader

Assuming you have installed nbgrader

cd my-abc-classroom-course
nbgrader quickstart my-nbgrader-course : this will create a nbgrader course directory called ``nbgrader``

Make sure the “course_materials” setting in config.yml matches the name of what you used for my-nbgrader-course (see below for config instructions).

Develop your notebooks in the my-nbgrader-course/source directory, then to generate the student versions for an assignment called assignment1:

cd my-abc-classroom-course
cd my-nbgrader-course
nbgrader generate_assignment assignment1`

This will generate the student versions of the assignment notebooks in my-nbgrader-course/release. You are now ready to create the template repository for GitHub classroom.

Manage Assignments Manually

Create a directory for course materials inside your abc-classroom course directory:

cd my-abc-classroom-course
mkdir course_materials

You can call this directory anything you want. Modify the value of “course_materials” in config.yml (as described below) to match your chosen directory name. Then, create a release directory in your course materials dir (this _must_ be called release):

mkdir course_materials/release

Put the files that you want to distribute to students in the release directory before creating a new template repository.

Add Files To Every Assignment Repository

There are probably some files that you want to add to each assignment repository. Any files that you wish to add to every new template repo can be added to the extra_files directory which is created when you run abc-quickstart to set things up. By default, abc-quickstart will generate an extra_files directory containing:

  1. a generic README.md file for the repository and

  2. a .gitignore file.

You can add any additional files that want in each repo to this directory. File that you may want could include things like:

  1. a customized .gitignore file

  2. logos and graphics that you want to display on every student assignment

  3. custom modules needed to complete assignments for the course

Any files in the extra_files directory will be addeded by defaul to each template repository.

Ignore Some Files

In many cases there may be system and tool based files that you do not wish to move. if that is the case, you can populate the files_to_ignore section of your config.yml file with anything that you want to skip.

. code-block:: yaml

# Add any system files that you wish to ignore when copying files to your # template here files_to_ignore: - .DS_Store - .ipynb_checkpoints

Note

Currently abc-classroom does not support moving entire directories over to new template repos. We will consider adding that functionality in the future if it is of community interest AND/OR are open to community PR’s to add that functionality.

Update config.yml

To tell abc-classroom where the directory containing your course materials is located, update the config.yml file. Change the course_materials parameter in that file to the location on your computer that contains your assignments (if you used the nbgrader quickstart, above, then use the directory created by nbgrader).

# Path to the course_materials directory. Assumed to be relative to course_dir unless
# you enter an absolute path (i.e. starting with '/' on Linux or OS X or with
# 'C:' on Windows).
course_materials: course_materials
Manage Assignments Create A New Assignment Template GitHub Repository