Week 3: Snow Day + Facepalm

So we did not make as much progress as we had hoped this week.  Part of this I will blame on the closing of the university due to "snow," but mostly I blame a brilliant moment of utter incompetence, which I will explain below.

We left off replacing some code that we got from the Google Canvas forum in order to fix a problem in the Canvas install.

Our next step was to start the server and log into Canvas using the "bundle exec script/server" command, a step we expected to be pretty straightforward.  First we had to make sure that our Ruby version matched our Gems version (1.9.3) with a simple "rvm use 1.9.3," but when I tried to start the server, I kept getting this message:

WARNING: Nokogiri was built against LibXML version 2.9.1, but has dynamically loaded 2.7.8

=> Call with -d to detach

=> Ctrl-C to shutdown server

I spent the rest of the week frantically searching forums looking for a solution and functionally getting nowhere.  When we were finally able to reconvene at the end of the week, we realized that the WARNING was just that - only a warning.  The server had been working the whole time (major facepalm).  

I think that's one of the most valuable lessons I've learned in this process so far: sometimes you get so deep in the weeds that you almost expect things to go wrong at every step and end up losing sight of the real problem.  Often the best solution is to pull back and look at the bigger picture. 

So now that we were finally able to log in to Canvas on our server, we familiarized ourselves with the interface (creating classes, quizzes, etc) and then began trying to make our own question type, which we will hopefully be able to incorporate SymPy into. 

The tutorial to create a new question type was shared on the Google Canvas forum and can be found here. 

Goals for next week: 

1. Create/code new question in Canvas (finish 'create question' tutorial)
2. Familiarize ourselves with LTI learning modules on Canvas as possible alternative
3. Mathjax for inspiration