Week 5: Bugs in Canvas - Painting the Ugly Picture

This week we worked on de-bugging the code in Canvas to create our own question type.  We decided to do an additional walk-through on my mentor's system to copy the steps I took and see if similar errors cropped up.  When we finished the process, his version was a success, so we had to go back to my code and check in further detail.

I found some easy-to-fix, rookie mistakes that I had made (mostly boolean logic in conditional statements).  However, by the end of the first day we discovered I had apparently missed a curly brace in one of the files - most likely due to a difference in style in the original code. Once again a major facepalm on my part - the whole world broken by a single curly brace.

At that point we decided it would be easier to revert my files to their original state and re-do the question development steps now that we were more familiar with the structure of the code.  We used the "git status" command in terminal to see what files specifically had been changed and used "git checkout ." to revert the tracked files to their original state.  The base file that we created in the first step of the tutorial remained since it was never being tracked.  I worked through the steps a second time with a more familiar eye, and it worked! We were able to access our own question type at the front end of Canvas.

Our next step will be to become familiar with the front end interface to see if we can create a question that will meet our needs.  This mainly means increased student interaction with questions types via the ability to generate truly random questions and specify number or question type ranges for the kinds of problems they would potentially want to practice. 

On a side note, we are also working on making our private server faster, as development flow is nearly impossible at its current speed.  Our workaround for now to get familiar with the front-end interface has been to create a teacher's account in canvas (a free service offered by the website).  We are also looking into further tutorials linked on the Canvas Quick Start Guide. 

Goals for this week: 

1. Keep working on LTI learning modules in the background
2. Become familiar with question tools already present in Canvas - strengths and weaknesses