CodeRunner: scratchpad

Hello,

I was interested in using the scratchpad, seems like a possibly a good combo with a safe exam browser to minimise the use of chatGPT and alike cheating.

When I imported the question from the example question from the main page and downloaded and added the scratchpad as a question type, I get a few issues.

1. when I press run, it throws an error:

*** Scratchpad crashed. Out of memory, perhaps? ***

I am not too sure how to fix this, there seems to be not much documentation nor discussions about it.

2. I configured Jobe with Python 3.11, but the question type is looking for Python 3.10. So it fails to validate the answer (/bin/sh: 1: python3.10: not found).

It would be great to know any pointers to solve above problems I have, also interested to hear about how to conduct exams where students can easily copy paste answers from AI tools. Thanks!

Kind regards,

Jin

I see in the post "How to use Input UIs -> Ace_mini_ide" that it is still in development, so I guess the answer is to wait..!

Re: scratchpad

by Richard Lobb - Saturday, 8 July 2023, 5:59 PM

Sorry about the problem with python3.10 - that was indeed hard-coded in the subprocess call, rather than just python3. I've updated the question prototype, so you could either download that and replace the previous one with the updated one, or you could edit the Prototype Extra field of the prototype to replace python3.10 with just python3.

Let me know if that doesn't solve the "Scratchpad crashed" error.

The next release of CodeRunner will include the Scratchpad functionality in a new UI plugin. It's already available in the development branch on github if you're feeling adventurous.

As for exams in the day of ChatGPT - we run our exams in a restricted environment that locks out all internet access except to the Moodle server. And we also have exam invigilators to keep an eye on what students are doing.