Coding cat public problems

Coding Cat is a simple, in-browser platform for doing small Python problems to learn programming.

This repository contains the publicly available problems for Coding Cat.

Structure of the problems

Each problem must be in its own directory. The directory name should meaningfully reflect the problem description.

Each directory must contain the following files to describe the coding problem.

• description.md This is the problem prompt prompt and explains the problem.
• io.json The file consists of one JSON array of objects. Each object has the following properties:
  • input, whose value is itself an array of the inputs to call the student function with.
  • output, whose value is the expected output of the student function
• meta.json The metadata of the problem. This is a JSON object with the following keys.
  • title: a human-readable name for the problem
  • name: an internal name for the problem that MUST NOT be changed. This name MUST also match the name of the function defined in starter.py. (This name is used as a key in the persistence layer to store student progress on problems.)
  • difficulty: a number describing how challenging the problem is.
  • author: the name of the person who wrote the problem
  • category: a string used to group the problems
• starter.py: the python starter code for the problem

NOTE: the name in meta must be the name of the functino you want to test and run, in most cases this is the exact same function name as the starter function name!

Building

Included in this repo is a build script for compiling the list of problems into problems.js, which is then imported by the main Coding Cat UI.

• build-problem compiles one problem specified as the name of the directory for the problem. This produces a problem.json file in the problem directory.
• build-all-problems compiles all problems (including disabled ones), generating a problem.json in each problem directory.
• build-problem-list compiles problems.js in the root directory. This js file imports each problem.json file for each problem and defines a default export of a list of all the problem objects.

Enabling/disabling problems

The file enabled-problems controls which problems actually get build into problems.js. It is a list of problem names, i.e. strings that appear under the name key in meta.json.

enable-all-problems is a script that generates an enabled-problems file listing all problems as enabled.