CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2018- Project E1822: Extend the functionality of badging

Problem Statement

The aim of this project is to extend the functionality of badging that was implemented previously. [(Previous Implementation)].

The primary objectives for this project are as follows:

1. Allowing Instructor to create new badges - which involves adding name and badge image.
2. Students must be able to suggest "Good Teammate" badges during the teammate review periods.
3. Students must be able to suggest "Good Reviewer" badges, for reviews received.
4. Create a pipeline to enable instructor to manually approve badges suggested by students

Background And Motivation

Previous Implementation

The use of badges will encourage students to have a visual motivation based on their achievements and thus perform better. This has the ability to improve the overall class performance.

With such an aim of improving the over all class performance, badging system for Expertiza was implemented, as an [earlier project]. In that implementation, certain students are awarded badges when certain criteria are met which may include exceptional academic performance in assignments, project submissions etc. Two such badges, Good Reviewer and Good Team mater were implemented, with students receiving them automatically based on a threshold score in those categories. This was a static system with fixed number of badges.

The team had implemented the system, by introduction of 3 new badge related tables

1. “badges” :- id , name, description

2. “assignment_badges” :- id, badge_id, assignment_id, threshold

3. “awarded_badges” :- id, badge_id,participant_id

Motivation

The primary motivation behind this project is to give more flexibility to the instructor to assign badges instead of relying solely on automatic scoring. Also, allowing students to suggest Good Teammate and Good Reviewer badges for their peers will give them an incentive to put in more effort towards carefully reviewing other's work, and encourage them to actively participate in team projects.

Team Members

Students who collaborated to work on this problem statement are :

1. Akshay Ravichandran

2. Arunkumar Krishnamoorthy

3. Harish Pullagurla

4. Krithika Sekhar

Mentor:- Zhewei Hu (zhu6@ncsu.edu)

Design Description

The following steps briefly describe the implementation steps planned to be taken during the course of this project

Usecase Diagram

Creation of new badges

When an assignment is created/edited, there is a checkbox called "Has Badges?". Checking this renders the "Badges" tab. This tab currently lists the two available badges namely "Good Reviewer" and "Good Teammate" as specified in expertiza/app/views/assignments/edit/_badges.html.erb.

We intend to change this view to allow an instructor to add a new badge, and select all badges that will be applicable to this assignment. For this, we intend to display a link called "Add" and list all the available badges as a series checkboxes.

Clicking on "Add" would redirect to a new view, where there is a simple form to add a new badge. The form fields would include Badge Name, Image and Description.

Assignment of "Good Teammate" badges by student

Presently, the assignment of this badges is done automatically based on a threshold, which is set during assignment creation. The score is calculated based on answers to questions on the review page.

In this implementation, the earlier flow was changed to allow participant to be able to suggest these badges to their fellow students. To enable this process, a new question in the format of a checkbox, was added into the teammate review questionnaire. This question appears after the Additional Comments section.

Upon selection of this check box an entry is made into the assigned badges table with the participant id and approval status being 0, implying that it is pending with the instructor, for approval before displaying.

Assignment of "Good Reviewer" badges by student

Similar to Good Teammate badge, in the existing workflow, good reviewer was also assigned based on score and threshold. This is modified in our implementation, in a similar way as that of teammate badge. We add a "Good Reviewer check box" as a question in the feedback of the reviews given page. An entry is made to the awarded badges table with the approval status as 0. Once this field is changed to 1, it would display badges in the assignment row .

Approval of badges by instructor

Currently, the awarded_badges table has no column to indicate the approval status of an awarded badge. A db migrate was run to include this column.

Visibility of assigned badges to Students

Once approved by the instructor, the badges assigned would be visible in the assignment tab of the website as shown in the image. Badges corresponding to each of the assignments will be seen on the row of that particular assignment.

Files modified

Models

• expertiza/app/models/awarded_badge.rb

Controllers

• expertiza/app/controllers/badge_controller.rb (to be added)

Views

• expertiza/app/views/assignments/edit/_badges.html.erb
• expertiza/app/views/student_teams/view.html.erb
• expertiza/app/views/review_mapping/_review_report.html.erb
• expertiza/app/views/student_task/list.html.erb

Database changes

• Add a new column 'approval_status' in the awarded_badges table

New Files

• expertiza/app/views/assignments/edit/_add_new_badge.html.erb
• expertiza/app/views/assignments/edit/_approve_badge.html.erb

Test Plan

All new code to be added would be thoroughly tested using TDD methodology.

Here are some tests we have in mind:

1. Can save a badge with a valid name, description, and image.

2. Cannot save a badge with an invalid name.

3. Cannot save a badge with empty description.

4. Cannot save a badge without an image path.

5. Check that all badge names are rendered in the "Badges" tab.

6. Check that an instructor can approve student-suggested badges.

7. Check that an approved badge is rendered on student's assignments page if it is approved.

8. Check that a student can not see a badge on assignments page if it is not approved.

Future Work

1. The approval workflow is currently missing - when a student assigns a badge to a peer, the approval status is set to 0 and it will never appear in the other student’s homepage. Workflow to change the status by the instructor must be implemented.
2. There is currently no way for any newly created badge to be assigned to a student through the UI, even if it has been added to an assignment. This needs to be implemented.
3. Instructors cannot directly assign “Good Reviewer” badge through the UI. A separate flow to enable the user to do that would be useful

References

1. Expertiza on GitHub
2. The live Expertiza website
3. Pull Request for present implementation
4. Previous Badge implementation page