Week 6: The LTI Structure for Randomness

Now that we are more familiar with the Canvas coding structure and have built a working question type, we wanted to look into the real goal of our project: Adding an option in Canvas to create randomized quizzes and question practice for students.  Canvas has a similar option to this already, but the teachers still have to create a question bank and then "random" questions are pulled from that question bank.  Our goal is to make the process more automated and easier for students to access a wide range of practice problems given specific parameters.

I began by looking into creating random Math problems in general and came across this helpful resource. But the more important goal at the moment is to find a way to integrate this "Random Quiz" option into the Canvas interface.  Our first thought was to simply add a button in the Manage Question Bank area of Canvas and link our "Random Quiz" from there.

I found some useful tips here and more specifically here for how to add buttons in Canvas.  They mostly pointed me in the direction of using LTI and building our own app (an idea we had had in the background for awhile), so we started pursuing those learning modules more earnestly.

I recommend using Safari as your browser for these modules, as the server launch interface was very straightforward there and less buggy than in Chrome or Firefox (at least on my machine). We used the URL for our own server for these modules.

The first module was fairly straightforward - teaching us to recognize required parameters to build/use an app in Canvas and to ensure we had the proper setup. It wasn't until we got to the second module on signature verification that we ran into trouble.

The module suggested we use a library for signature verification, but neither of us knew how to implement one. So, we trudged along until we reached a point where manual verification was too tedious and time consuming (see above screenshot).  

Luckily, others ran into trouble at this exact spot, and we found what looks to be very useful advice in the Canvas forum. 

Goals for next week:

1. Find out how to implement library to automate signature verification
2. Continue LTI modules