We introduce Ribbon a wrapper around Moodle’s GIFT format, which enables instructors to compose a quiz in a Markdown document, with questions that have multiple versions. The tool accepts templated questions with placeholder strings in the body of the question and a list of multiple values, or a function/routine that generates a list of values. The output is a GIFT file containing a question for each variation of the list. This reduces the amount of time needed to create a high quality exam while minimizing students' incentive for copying each other.
A presentation explaining the project is available here.
The only dependency of the Ribbon module is Python 3. All imported packages should be installed in a clean, new Python 3 installation.
Usage information and help is include within the script. Issue
python3 ribbon.py --helpfor command line options and documentation.
Using the csv comment block, you can generate a question template, where the variables will be substituted by Ribbon to generate the final GIFT questions. Each template can have a header name, which identifies the hierarchy in the moodle question bank. The example
# exam/text/substitution
<!-- csv
form , word , answer
past tense , run , ran
plural , mouse , mice
scientific term, yawning , oscitancy
Latin term , unconquered, invicta
-->
The {{form}} of {{word}} is { ={{answer}} }
will generate 4 questions based on the template, with names Q001, ..., Q004 under exam/text/substitution path in moodle question bank.
- Initial commit
- Beta option: Coderunner questions
Design and development:
Frank Blanning1,
Dimitris Floros1,
Nikos Pitsianis1.
Communication:
Send your questions at {frankgou, fcdimitr} @auth.gr
or open a new issue.
Acknowledgements:
We thank Xiaobai Sun2 for her critical comments.
1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
2 Department of Computer Science, Duke University, Durham, NC USA