A simple tool for commenting on student code

[shickey]

Hi all,

I've been working on a simple tool for providing feedback on student code and I figured this would be the community that may actually have an interest in it. Here's the idea:

Our school uses google apps for managing student work so I usually receive assignment submissions as python files uploaded directly to google drive. To provide comments in the past, I have downloaded a file, run it file locally, then pasted the code into a google doc to add comments before I share it back to the student. This app aims to fix that terrible workflow by providing a commenting mechanism on the python file itself right in the browser (a la google docs commenting). Then, the student can open the file at the same URL to see my comments. I'll bet there already exists some tool for doing this, but building it was partially an exercise for myself. Here's the link to the live version:

http://shickey.github.io/codereview/

Current Features

• Opens code files directly in the browser from Google Drive (python only, for the moment)
• View/Edit/Comment permissions are handled via Google Drive
• Commenters can comment directly on sections of code
• Commenting supports Github Flavored Markdown
• Code can be run in the browser via Skulpt.js (note that Skulpt has some limitations)

Disclaimer: this is extremely alpha level software and undoubtedly has many bugs:

Known Issues/Limitations

• Code is READ-ONLY at this point (by design; it makes handling comments much simpler)
• Markdown in comments is not (yet) syntax highlighted
• Adding a new comment will discard any other unsaved comments
• Scrolling can get a little wonky if the program output is long
• Running code is subject to the existing limitations of Skulpt

Feel free to try it out, add feedback to the GitHub repo, or even fork a copy and submit some pull requests. I'm hoping at least one person out there may find it useful and maybe, just maybe, someone else will want to help me build it. Enjoy!

[paulproteus]

Hey Sean, This tool looks really cool. Thank you for building it! I work on an open source project called Sandstorm which is like Google Apps For Your Domain, but open source and self-hostable. I'm thinking it'd be cool to make your app available as one of the things you can install within Sandstorm; to get a sense of it, see https://apps.sandstorm.io/ Is that something you'd be interested in? If so, I can see if there's anyone else involved in education technology who'd be interested in making sure the app works well on Sandstorm -- unless you'd be willing to give it a shot? If so I'd be happy to help you out. The main obstacle I see is how to get the data in to a self-hosted instance on Sandstorm, since apps on Sandstorm have short-lived hostnames so I don't think we could set up an API key with Google Drive. Perhaps @mnutt would find this interesting, since he wrote a tool that does file synchronization on Sandstorm. This is personally fascinating for me because I've been doing Python programming teaching for ~12 years, most famously with the Boston Python Workshop for Women and Their Friends in 2011, and I'd love to see people able to use this at workshops.

[shickey]

@paulproteus Awesome! Thanks for checking it out and thanks for the feedback. Honestly, I'm not sure I have much time to devote to porting it to another platform (I can justify working on the google drive version since it's what our school uses), but I would be curious to know what that might look like. What would be involved in porting it do you think? In any case, I'd certainly be willing to offer guidance if there were someone who would want to do the porting work.

[ashleykornee]

Oh, thanks a lot, shickey. I had the same problem. I'll definitely try this tool for my work on supremedissertations.