Experiment: Prototype a system to test more open ended exercises analogous to GDPractice

[NathanLovato]

The practice testing framework GDPractice allows us to create all kinds of interactive exercises and to test precise requirements at runtime.

GDTour was initially designed with the idea of creating interactive guides through the user interface of Godot but the more students progress through the curriculum, the less handholding they need, and the more comfortable they are exploring and figuring things out on their own.

This task is about creating a proof of concept for more open-ended exercises and challenges that would take place directly in the editor.

The needs are similar to GDPractice, with perhaps more of a need for constant feedback:

• Students need to know what they need to do, have access hints, and clear tasks with dynamic feedback.
• The tasks could have multiple requirements and pre-requisites that help guide users (for example, an area node needs a child collision shape.
• We could consider QCMs as well to get students thinking about what will happen when doing this or that operation or to test their knowledge.
• Consider how to provide troubleshooting information or optionally precise steps to help students and teachers learning in a self-paced environment get unstuck (especially in early lessons).

After doing a proof of concept and figuring out the user experience, we could see if GDPractice and GDTour couldn't be brought closer one way or another, because with this they'll have some overlapping functionality and purpose (that they don't have currently). Concretely, I'm thinking that we could benefit from some features (editor interface access, editor overlays, state testing...) being moved to library-like addons, similar to what Ricard (Epictellers) showed us, so they're accessible from both technologies.

[NathanLovato]

Concrete case for the question of hints, troubleshooting, and pre-requisites:

Throughout this exercise this student has to have:

• The mushrooms.png tile source
• The tile source should be selected
• The mushroom tiles should be set up
• The top row of mushroom tiles should have a collision shape on physics layer 0
• ...

Each step/task/challenge in the tour builds upon everything done before and the student could inadvertently break or undo anything (like removing a tile by right clicking). Things the student can do inadvertently could either get them stuck due to a lack of contextual feedback (troubleshooting information) or cause errors in the code that checks for things.

The code notably has to repeat defensively every check every time to avoid the risk of spamming the Output bottom panel with errors.

More generally, if we have a stack (or tree) of dependencies in the tasks and related checks, we could have feedback messages that toggle contextually if students are slightly off.

[NathanLovato]

Idea: Testing projects with GDTour

This discussion makes me think that we could probably auto-test more than just smaller exercises, but actually requirements in broader game mechanics or levels: nothing like careful human review but imagine a challenge like: Create a level that's at least 60 cells wide, with a falling platform, 2 mobs, ...

We could automatically validate that all the ingredients are there and give learners this nice validation and progress checkmark that they've completed a little project or broader task.