[Server-devel] help regarding Gsoc ...

[>^< CrOsS FiRe >^<]

hello people ... i needed some help regardin google summer of code. This was
my original idea , here's the abstract (More of a brain dump):

Sugar, is education ! Hence one of its most important objective would
necessarily be to teach programming to children (Which was also told by one
of the Sugar Lab's Developer in my IRC chat). “Pippy” is one such software
in Sugar, which teaches programming in python. A close inspection of this
particular software would reveal several missing features (Which when
incorporated would make Pippy “Complete” ). Though this program does a very
good job of teaching the programming basics (along with variety of
examples), yet there is no way that a group of students would be able to
interact and compete against one another. Hence the primary objective of
this project is to incorporate an “Online Judge” feature in a “Group Chat”
environment and take Pippy to the next level. An Online judge is basically a
server which compiles the source code, runs its against a set of predefined
test cases and then checks for correctness and accuracy of the output (or
your source code indirectly). The correctness is checked against a set of
predefined outputs, for the same problem statement. This feature will be
added along a group chat environment, in which students and teachers can
interact simultaneously while a programming session goes on. This would be
implemented in a decentralized environment and the Online judge engine would
reside in the teacher's system. A white board will also be added to this
environment, so that students and teachers can draw diagrams (whose need
often arises in any programming session). At first this might seem just like
any other virtual classroom, but this project has got far more than what a
regular virtual classroom can offer. First of all there is no virtual
classroom which gives such an competitive edge to its users. As sugar is
mainly intended for children less than 16 years of age. Teaching them
programming, even with “cool” examples in Pippy can easily bore them. Small
programming challenges with loads of interesting awards can be held
regularly. This would not only increase their interaction with the peers but
also get them hooked to programming ( For the sake of the prizes of course !
They are children after all !). Not only this, but everyday
practice/teaching session can be held, in which teachers would ask them to
complete a module in Pippy and then test their code through the Online
judge. You might wonder why? (Because Pippy itself has a python
interpreter). Well the answer and yet another reason why this project is
more that what it seems is because, every submission from the students would
be logged by the teacher's system and added to the teacher's database.
Evaluation and performance reports can be easily generated likewise.

This project is not intended to test the programming ability limit of the
school kids, but to actually assist them in stepping in to the programming
world. Every concept of programming can be tested. A perfect instance would
be a test of “Looping structure in python”. A simple problem can be given to
the students in which they are asked to print “Hello world” 100 times. A
student familiar with loop concept would use a simple loop and print. Others
would actually write a print statement in their code 100 times !! The online
judge would easily detect it by looking into the source code size. Obviously
repetitive print statements would exceed the source limit (Which can be
checked precisely). Such possibilities are endless.

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But i guess i'll have to add the Online judge to the XS server module. Or
how do i go about it ? help plz...

I primarily thought of using :
Python language to code (Pippy is in python :D), Mysql database, Glade
interface designer etc. Sugar's “Chat” program engine will be used for
private and group chat.
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