Team Size

[rtholmes]

I have manually created some teams of three with the current install. If you look you'll see a bunch of names in 'create team' that you will also see on the list above (see team 85, 86, 87). On the students page their team number also doesn't show up. Any ideas? I wonder if it's just iterating twice through each team somewhere instead of through all members?

[rtholmes]

This was my mistake entirely. If you add someone to a team you need to also set their hasTeam attribute to true.

[mksarge]

Team size is set in config.js under the property team_size. I just searched the project and found 2 places in the project that this value is used in a non-trivial way:

• Create Team module (both Student and Admin Portal):
  The number of dropdown forms displayed, and thus the number of students that can be selected to form a team (using the UI), is dependent on team_size. (Of course, you can manually add students to teams by directly editing the database as you did.)
• All Teams module (in Admin Portal > Team View):
  I just discovered that the code actually has a bug right now; it is supposed to use team_size to determine how many students to render on the table, but due to an "off-by-one" bug it displays team_size + 1, which is why we can see the teams of 3 students properly right now, even though your team_size = 2.

[mksarge]

More team_size design notes:

With the current design, it is not possible to create teams of various sizes. Specifically, you can't:

• make a team with less than team_size members, because the CreateTeam submission button will not accept teams with empty/null values (eg. select 2 names and leave 1 blank, with team_size = 3)
• make a team with more than team_size members, because the CreateTeam module only displays as many dropdown-select forms as specified in team_size.

One simple-enough change that would allow variable team sizes, with an upper limit, is simply re-purpose team_size into max_team_size and allow the Create Team submission button to accept teams of

1 <= n <= max_team_size or 1 < n <= max_team_size.

@rtholmes Thoughts? Were you just testing the system by making those teams of three, or are they meant to be legitimate teams this semester?

[rtholmes]

I manually forced a few students into three-person to help even out lab sizes in the course and to reflect students who had withdrawn from the course. So while students were only allowed to select two-person teams, being able to specify n+1 on the admin view might have been helpful. This is certainly not a normal use case, but team changes late in the term tend to be tricky either way.