Use rstudio shiny+flexdashboard to create random stats assignments
The flexTeaching app is an interface which allows the creation and deployment of lessons and assignments that include personalized random data, based on a random seed based on their student ID.
Students can download their personalized data sets and see the assignment. Assignment markers can obtain the solutions specific to that student using their ID plus the secret in use at the time the student downloaded the data set. Students can obtain solutions to exercises with other randomized data sets for practice.
New assignments can be built and placed in the assignments directory, and they will be automatically picked up by the app.
Benefits:
- Every student's assignment is unique
- Markers who know the secret can get the solutions to a student's exercises
- Students who do not know the secret can still generate an infinite number of practice exercises
- The student's practice exercises can include the solutions. The solutions can be hidden by the student until needed
There are two ways of seeing how it works.
Data download interface: http://richarddmorey.shinyapps.io/test/download.Rmd
Solutions/practice interface: http://richarddmorey.shinyapps.io/test/solve.Rmd
Try changing the student ID or secret and seeing how the solutions change in the solutions/practice interface. Remember to untick the "Hide answers?" box to see the solutions.
Just download the repository and run the corresponding .Rmd file in the Rstudio interface.
The button may say "knit" the first time you run it; that's ok, just click it. You might have to install the packages listed below before it will run.
## Install necessary packages
install.packages(c("shiny","rmarkdown","stargazer","broom","xtable",
"flexdashboard","digest","base64enc","haven","xlsx",
"lubridate"), dep=TRUE)
Without Rstudio:
## You may need to install the packages above
setwd('/PATH/TO/REPOSITORY/app')
# For data download interface
rmarkdown::run('download.Rmd')
# For solutions interface
rmarkdown::run('solve.Rmd')
You can help in three ways:
- Create new assignments. Use the included example assignments to generate new assignments and contribute them back to the project.
- Report/fix bugs. While you're creating a new assignment, you may find a bug. Please report it in the GitHub issues and/or fix it and make a pull request.
- Add new features. The project is very new. No doubt there are many features that could be added to make it more useful to you and others. Please contribute!
The html_fragment assignments are flexible; however, a current limitation is that I do not know how to include the proper HTML dependencies for nice features like plotly and other htmlwidgets. Hopefully we'll figure out a way around this.