CodeTurtle 0.3 Released
March 31st, 2009
After four graded projects for the semester, I figured it was about time to get the changes I’ve made in that time out into a new release. There are a few new things coming (hopefully) soon and am getting some outside help, so making a clean break now felt like the right time. Ok, and to be honest, I was starting to lose track of what I had added to the release notes and what I had just committed on the fly in an effort to get done grading projects, so I wanted a fresh start.
Like I said, I’ve now graded four projects this semester using CodeTurtle, so a number of the changes were made directly as a result of something that was actively annoying me. For instance, while writing the project grader, I found myself restarting and reloading the project a number of times. To facilitate that, I added some minimal command line support to automatically create the grade book with the proper grader and submissions values (I’d also like to add a “Reload grader” option in the near future).
The biggest change was gutting and rewriting the project grader APIs. I’ve written about some of the changes before and I want to write up a much better tutorial on writing a project grader in the near future (I know, I know, everything I want to do is in the “near future”), so I won’t talk about too many details right now. I will say that the new APIs feel a lot cleaner and have added quite a bit of flexibility in the way I do the testing of the student submissions.
The sample project is a bit lame and doesn’t really showcase all of what CodeTurtle can do, I realize that. I need to find me an intern or a monkey or a student in dire need of extra credit to flush that out for me.
Oddly, as I look back 0.2 was released right near Spacewalk 0.4, and now this one happens to line up with 0.5. I guess all that talk in work about releasing things inspires me.
CodeTurtle 0.3 can be downloaded at the project’s site on SourceForge.
