I am a new user who was planning to use replit to prepare a couple of MS students for a coding competition at the end of the month. Ohio State Tournament After asking some for some clarifications from the organizers, I’ve accepted responsibility for actually running the event at the end of the month.
Science Olympiad is a K-12-affiliated national program; this event is for Division B students, 6-9th grade. I need to allow 40 groups of two students to pair program through a problem in 50 minutes. The rules as I received them say, “full internet access”, but those rules were written before ChatBot-GPT was available.
I need to give one assignment to the entire Team/Event, and then I need to be able to review what each school’s team submits. Autograding would be nice, but I can write a test script for the functional part of that. The schools’ teams are not collaborators but rather competitors; I don’t want them to have any access to anyone’s work but their own. (or the permitted, “anything on the internet” <sigh>)
I apologize for asking a question that I’m going to have to work through myself over the next couple of weeks anyway; what I’m looking for here is either (a) anyone with experience using replit to do something similar, and/or (b) anyone with more experience with the tool than I have (nearly everyone) who has reason to believe this either will or won’t work. Thanks!
2 Likes
PS I also need to provide them with an executable that they will need to blackbox - the event is called “Run It Code It” - I’m presuming I’d want to drop a .pyc file into the Project somehow.
1 Like
so you seem to need to do things with the replit API? Well, you should firstly create bounties or community posts for each portion since there are a lot of bounty hunters/volunteers here who specialize in specific things (for example, I specialize in the API)
I don’t think my time constraints are likely to permit that. We (Ohio) got this event from California, where it was run as a trial, and replit was mentioned as a URL in the list of resources. So there is a suggestion that someone might have done this already, but I don’t have contact information or even a wiki article to determine how that worked out.
I’m parallel processing to decrease my exposure; I will take this up with the tournament staff and see if they have a contact for the original event designer, and if the answer is either, “it was easy” or “we didn’t use replit” I will update this thread.
1 Like
Thanks - I was there and watched David’s first two videos. This is a GREAT tool - I taught at an online bootcamp in 2020 and this would have been really helpful to many of our students. I’ve been a (mostly backend) developer for a long time; the documentation so far seems excellent, and I don’t doubt that I’ll be able to figure out what is possible with the current version in the next two weeks. The risk is that if there is a blocker I can’t see now it will be much more difficult to move in a different direction in a week or two., which is why I’m asking for a sanity check now.
1 Like
ok sounds good, sorry to bother you but um could your fancy words be compiled into programmer/normal people talk. I can speak both XD
1 Like
first, this is kinda meta, and I’m old, but if you are an employee I hope you are highly placed, because talking to a user like that might be construed as dismissive or off-putting. You don’t know me at all - if you think I’m overly wordy or full of my self that’s your call, but IMO expressing that opinion to me isn’t particularly helpful.
I use the words I have to both ask my question and to explain the circumstances which constrain the critical path. I cannot wait out anyone’s sprint cycle - I have to find or implement a solution in 17 days, so with my low confidence that this (or any) the system will do what my use case demands out-of-the-box, I don’t the resources to wait and see if someone else will solve my problem.
So again, I’m asking about how those who use this tool run an assessment in replit - I don’t need to create a collaborative environment; I need to admit students to a competitive one. I still suspect that replit might be used to do this - maybe it’s in the docs - but you haven’t answered my question yet.
(thanks for making the effort, seriously - I appreciate you are trying to communicate)
1 Like
no I’m a volunteer on the forums sorry 
I just volunteer my time on the forums lemme ping some higher ups:
@IanAtReplit
Hi @GordonBurgess , thanks @anon93015244 for the ping.
I’ll try to answer your queries in between some quotes, if that’s ok.
I can definitely recommend using Teams for Edu to set up a project containing the problem to be solved and the groups (pairs of students) that are going to complete this. When the students click on “start project” a copy of your project will be created for each pair and you can access their work through the Teams menu in Replit.
I don’t think you can easily create autograding for this, but perhaps it could be posted as a bounty for others to solve in time for the next event?
Using Teams for Edu reduces the chance of others easily accessing a Repl but doesn’t completely remove the risk. The Repls exist like any other personal Repl but they aren’t accessible via the user’s profile page. If another team knew exactly what the URL was of another team’s work, they could see it.
I hope this helps. There is maybe another thing that might help here. I use Replit to deliver assignments which have to be completed under supervision and kept secure. To make sure no students can access other student work, or that students can access their assignment files from home / outside the CS classroom I use a script to assign access to private Repls. Students can be given the link to “their” Repl in advance but they see a 404 error until I run the script that adds their username as a collaborator. Later I run another script to remove that access. I retain ownership of the Repl and can review history in case it’s needed. I’m happy to share more details about how I do this if it would help here, but it might not be what you need for this situation.
4 Likes
your welcome for ping and yes do what Ian says! I’m just a volunteer 
3 Likes
Thanks both for your assistance. I’m encouraged to push this a bit farther. I will ask more specific questions if I need to, and assuming I get things to work as needed I’ll produce documentation for the next Science Olympiad Event Supervisor(s) and drop it on our wiki.
The simplest approach to this task would likely involve creating a Python Flask server that crawls through links where participants have submitted their solutions. The server would extract the content and generate a JSON file from it. Another script would then take that JSON file as input, run tests on the code within it, and generate the corresponding grades.
But virtually any web technology node.js or other can do it but python is probably one of best for this kind of task as it is so easy to maintain and chance if grading needs chance and this kind of task really wont need maximize performance.
But this solution require that educator knows links where solutions are in advance and have them stored in some file but there could be better solutions than I can figure out. 