It's important to have dynamic 24/7 interactive activities for programming classes. There are plenty of solutions out there, including Matlab Grader and Möbius. The folks at Jetbrains have their Academy system, too. What I need, at this stage, is a no bells-and-whistles, auto-grader for Matlab code that can run a unit test on a student's […]
Introduction In YorkU's EECS Department, we have access to NGSPICE on our department's Linux machines (via RemoteLab). NGSPICE is yet another variation on the venerable SPICE circuit simulator. Our the University's Moodle system, eClass, we have access to Virtual Programming Lab, a framework for making interactive exercises for students. It is typically used with programming […]
Virtual Programming Lab can be a little intimidating to use, but once you get the swing of things, it's pretty good. So, let's get you started with the simplest possible working example. We assume that: you have Moodle working at your institution someone has installed VPL on Moodle and you don't need or have access […]
The Teaching in Focus (TiF) conference at York was held online in 2021 due to the pandemic. Here's a list of the abstracts. My "Welcome to my Classroom" talk was based on the work I did in EECS 1011, 1021 and 2021: Giving students rapid and accurate feedback is vital. We can do so with […]
Introduction Microchip's MPLAB X permits simulation from the command line. This is interesting from the perspective of teaching if we have automatically-graded programming assignments that take the student's program and runs it against a simulated chip in an LMS like Moodle. Background I'm interested in how we can use the MDB in MPLAB X to […]
Most profs have overflowing email inboxes, making it hard to keep track of student emails. Two ways that I've heard of dealing with this effectively is to (a) create a class specific email address and (b) have students use the messaging system within the LMS. While messaging will work by default, you may wish to […]
H5P modules are fantastic ways to add interactive content to your Moodle (*ahem* I mean "eClass") page. The LTS folks at York have a page on H5P. Here's my take on it. To create H5P content on eClass is a little different than on the older version of Moodle. Here's how you do it. Start […]
When designing your content on Moodle (eClass) it's important to test out how it looks and feels from a student perspective. In the Summer of 2020, YorkU's "DemoStudent" was introduced to provide that. With few exceptions, it shows what the student sees, all without having profs ask a student to log in or to beg […]
UIT has rebadged Moodle as "eClass" and now made the "Playground" feature front and centre for teaching faculty to create areas for us to test ideas without immediately changing an existing course. Access it via the "Create Playground" link on the left of your welcome page: We can now more easily name the playground. This […]
With the move to online I think that it's important to have students track their completion of tasks. I'm turning on completion tracking on eClass. Some of the material I want students to receive grades for (like answering questions in an interactive video) while other material I want them to simply report that they did […]