To have access to the instructor's dashboard where you can create assignments and see your students' progress, you must create your own copy of the course following the directions below. All updates to the course are shared with the custom copies.

1. Create your own copy of the CSAwesome course by clicking on Create a Course. Click here to be directed to the Runestone Academy website. 

   1. 1. Choose a unique name like SchoolName-2023 for your custom course and choose CS Awesome as the course to copy. 

      2. For more info, see https://guide.runestone.academy/chapter-3.html#custom-courses_how-to-create-a-custom-course .

2. Have your students register for your course in one of the two following ways (more info here):

a.  Student-directed: Create your custom course. Tell your students to go  to https://runestone.academy/ and click on Sign Up and enter in the info to set up an account and enter Your Course Name (e.g. SchoolName-2023) into the Course Name field. Check the box next to “I agree” and click Sign Up.

b. Teacher-directed: If your students do NOT have Runestone accounts already, you can upload a csv file (save any spreadsheet as a csv file) with rows of username, email, first_name, last_name, password, coursename in Instructor's Page/Admin/Manage Students. You get to make up their usernames and passwords and register them for Runestone and your course. See here  on how to sign up students without PII and personal emails.

• Access the Instructor's Page by clicking on the Person icon at the top right of Runestone. Make sure that you are logged in and that you are in your custom course (if not, use Change Course from the same menu). 

• https://guide.runestone.academy/chapter-5.html#instructor-interface_the-instructor-interface 

In the Instructor's Page of your custom course, you can see your students' progress in the Student Progress tab. Select a chapter/unit from the drop down menu to see your class' progress on that chapter and all the exercises in it. You can click on each student or each exercise to see the details. See here for more info. There are also two buttons for Chapter Activity and the Gradebook. 

• The Chapter Activity provides a spreadsheet with each student and how many exercises they have attempted on each page/lesson. This is a quick way to see what they have attempted and completed. However, they are not graded. The coding exercises can only be manually graded at this point. The spreadsheet has filtering functions built in with the down triangles on each column and can be downloaded to use in Excel or Google Sheets.

• The gradebook is for assignments that you have given and graded (see Creating and Grading Assignments for more information).

New in Aug 2023: There are now ready-made assignments that you can copy in from the base CSAwesome course! 

• Click on the user icon and select Instructor's Page (note: this will only be there if you created a custom course).

• Scroll down to find Copy Assignments, select csawesome and copy all or some of the assignments (help). 

In these assignments, students get 5 interaction points for interacting with at least 75% of the material in a lesson in the reading section (these are all or nothing points). Students will receive individual correctness points in the problem section for correctly completing:

• The autograded challenge programming exercise

• Any AP questions

• Possible extra active code exercises if they cover material not in the challenge/ are helpful for the challenge. 

The pretest, midterm test, and posttest are all included in assignments (note: make sure Show as Timed Assessment is checked so students only get one try on multiple choice questions.) This can be reset in the Admin tab. There is also an optional Peer Instruction activity as an assignment in each unit.

Setting Up Assignments:

Click here to access the Runestone guide for creating assignments. 

• Reading Section: We recommend setting up an assignment for each lesson or groups of lessons where the lesson(s) are chosen as the assignment to be graded for interaction. 

• Problems Section: We recommend choosing the Challenge coding problem in the lesson to grade manually. 

Grading Assignments

Most exercises on the lesson pages (active codes, multiple choice, fill in the blank, matching, and Parson's Problems) are auto-graded. Active code problems tend to be graded by looking for expected output or code fragments. The auto-grader will let students and teachers know if the code is complex enough to meet the learning objectives. Teachers should spend time looking at th code manually to provide students with feedback.  The guide to grading assignments can be found here. 

Tips for Grading: 

• In the Grading tab, after you choose an assignment, uncheck "check work submitted before deadline", click on Autograde, and then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on Show to Students. Students will not be able to see their grades if you don't turn that on for every assignment. This includes clicking autograde for the interaction points. 

  • If students submit work late, you will have to autograde again. 

• For manual grading or leaving feedback, you have to choose the assignment, the question, each student, and then run their code. You can also choose a unit, lesson, question, and student to see their work. Students will only see feedback on assignments. 

• In the Grading Tab, when you're looking at Active Code, sometimes students try things at the end and overwrite what they did earlier. You can slide the slider to see what they did earlier. This is also a nice look into how they went about solving it!  

Checking Student Progress:

In the Student Progress tab, there is a gradebook button all the way to the right that provides a useful way to look at grades. You can also download the gradebook into a spreadsheet.

Example of setting up a Pre-test assignment to see their pre-test scores:

1. Click on the Assignments tab, click on the Add button, and type in an assignment name like pretest and click on Create. Under Problems, choose the Pretest lesson and it will add all the problems from it. 

2. Then, switch to the Grading tab, and choose that assignment, and hit autograde. 

3. Then, switch to Student Progress tab, and click on the Gradebook button all the way to the right.

Practice Tool

There is a practice tool that will display review problems. See  here on how to sign up and use it.

Peer Instruction Tool

There is a new peer instruction tool which is a special type of assignment for multiple-choice questions where students can vote on an answer and then discuss it in groups. See  Runestone Peer Instruction and Runestone Structured Collaboration.

Search for canterburyqb problems at the bottom of the assignments tab problem section for good peer instruction questions.

Design new Problems:

You can also create your own problems in the Assignments tab of the instructor page in the Problems section or choose problems made by other teachers that are not in the ebook. The easy way to create a new problem is to click on one that's close to what you want, click on edit, and change the id and question, run, and save.  Put something unique at the start of all your ids so you can search for them later. You can find more information here.

Runestone allows annotations using Hypothes.is which is built-in. Hypothes.is can be used for independent or collaborative online annotations.

• Click on the < on the top right of a course to open the annotations window.

• You can set up a new private group for your class and invite your students to join it. 

• Then, you or students can highlight text and annotate it to make a comment or ask a question about it and reply to each other.

Tutorials: You can access the complete list of tutorials here. 

Below are some helpful tutorials to get you started. 

• Annotation Demo

  • Video

  • Webpage

• Creating Groups

  • Video

  • Webpage

• Group Annotations

  • Video 

  • Webpage

The Practice Tool that you can enable in Runestone has been shown to reduce the achievement gap between students by giving practice problems from the ebook every day to students to review material.

There is a practice tool tab in the instructor's page where you can set it up for students to review problems. See here on how to sign up and use it.

Practice Tool Webinar (Oct. 1st, 2020):

• Slides

• Video

Quick Steps:

• Go to Instructor's Page/Practice Tool

• Fill out the form. We suggest 100 days of practice over the year. Choose Manual for the last question and scroll down to check off the lessons you have already completed with the class (wait until you've at least completed Unit 1). If it's taking a long time, check off each lesson one at a time, instead of the whole unit.

• Tell students to do user icon/Practice every day

• As you finish each unit, go back to the Practice Tool tab to add that unit's lessons one by one. 

To use Runestone Pair Programming support, turn it on and off for your course whenever you want in the Instructor Page of your custom course. Click on the Admin tab and then Course Settings button and check or uncheck Allow Pairs as needed. 

• When the Allow Pairs is checked, the Active Code window will allow for students to connect their code to their partner's in the database. Students will have to type in the username of their partner to connect their code. 

  • Whenever either partner clicks the Save & Run button, it will be saved for both partners. If students click on Load History, the shared code from their partner will appear. 

  • When grading student work, a comment will appear in the program to indicate which students worked togther in this program. Be sure to look for this when evaluating and grade each partner separately. 

Watch this video to see it in action. 

In Peer Instruction, students anonymously answer multiple choice questions, discuss their answers with a partner, and then submit an answer a second time. You can learn more about Peer Instruction here. 

There is a new peer instruction tool in Runestone. If you copy the base course CSAwesome assignments from the Admin tab of the Instructor's Page in your custom course, there is a Peer Instruction assignment made for each unit.  Or just choose some challenging MCQs or search for canterburyqb problems at the bottom of the assignments tab problem section for more peer instruction questions. You can learn more about this new peer instruction tool here.