View Users Solutions

[imcodingideas]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The goal for classroom-mode is to enable teachers to help students, and do code reviews along the way.

Describe the solution you'd like

We would like to ask to see students code submission i.e. https://www.freecodecamp.org/ojongerius view solution.

Describe alternatives you've considered

We could scrape this, but would really like access to the data in the API.

[ojongerius]

I think solutions will no longer be stored at freeCodeCamp. @freeCodeCamp/open-api can you confirm this?

[raisedadead]

That is the plan. We are removing all solutions other than the links to user submitted projects. I understand that its a breaking change for class room mode.

But I think @imcodingideas you should probably connect with @QuincyLarson for more confirmation.

/cc @Bouncey

[user512]

It's a surprise to me. Let's say a student is only half way thru a challenge in FCC, and the student decided to complete the challenge tomorrow, the student will have to start from the beginning?
It sounds like fcc still have to store student solution somewhere.

[Bouncey]

We are still storing solutions in localStorage, which are then removed on successful submission. So half completed solutions, that have had the tests ran on, them will still be held in that browser which is the case in production right now.

Currently, freeCodeCamp only stores completed solutions in the database.

This is a major contributing factor to the size of our user records and, in some cases, the slowness of queries against these records. Currently our user records alone are touching 70GB and will only get bigger. After a planned migration coming soon, which includes the removal of non-project solutions, our entire user data set will be around 10.5GB.

[user512]

Thanks @Bouncey for the explanation, this is a smart way to operate without compromising user experience.

[imcodingideas]

@Bouncey isn't that the benefit of graphql, so we're able to query the data that we need.

[Bouncey]

@imcodingideas 100% it is. But with a larger data structure we have a higher overhead for controlling user privacy and storage/transfer costs of backups and production database instances.

We are making an effort to reduce db costs for challenges so we can expand the value of future services provided by freeCodeCamp, as always, for free. This will become more evident in the coming months, and will lean on a new graphql api supported by this project.

Being 100% donor supported, we have to watch those pennies.

[imcodingideas]

As I see this data, defining the success of classroom-mode - what if I were to donate a significant part of last years backup cost. Would that enable us to at least keep the data for now? @QuincyLarson please connect with @utsab for my contact information.

[ojongerius]

Could a feasible solution be to store solutions for students if, and only if they are registered with a classroom?

I know this is currently not implemented. We'd have to provide support for classrooms in open-api. However with the classroom team providing development support, and possibly even financial support, why not?

[utsab]

Before we make any decisions on this, I'd like to do a few user interviews with teachers to get a better sense of how much they really want to see students' solutions. My intuition is that they would more highly value statistics like how many attempts a student has made or how much time spent on a challenge, not necessarily the content of the solution.

Would it be possible for the api to return the number of attempts on a given challenge, or how much time a student spent on it? If so, that would be fantastic.

I plan on chatting with a few teachers this month to validate my assumptions here.

[imcodingideas]

@ojongerius I would be totally OK with something like that. Another solution would be to have a lamda function that deletes the solutions for Users who are inactive for some number of period. Say, 6 months.

This way the database size, and cost does get reduced and maintainable. I do have experience with AWS and would love to provide development support and financial support.

[ojongerius]

Great!

Let's see what @utsab comes back with first.