This relates to the homepage and Explore page (not the Snap programming language), so this may be the wrong Category.
I work with TEALS. The new homepage website looks great. Being able to Explore other's complex games and projects is fun and useful. However, I worry that the "Latest Projects" on the homepage and also probably the "Published Projects" on the Explore page might lead to TEALS students just copying another TEALS student's work.
Examples found in less than 1 minute:
Hi, reporting it here is fine.
Our plan for BJC is to exclude its homeworks from the front page. We can do that algorithmically because the assignment files are all of the form U[1-8]L[1-9]-.* If you give us either an algorithm like that (a regular expression, in our case) or a list of filenames, we'll do the same for TEALS.
P.S. Of course this only solves the problem of students tripping over each other's work accidentally. If two students want to cheat, we can't really stop them. We don't worry about it too much because hardly any of their online work is actually graded; it's for them to learn from, and if they choose not to learn, they're the ones who suffer. If you want to be truly sure you don't have students turning in each others' work, you'll have to use turnitin.com or something.
Yeah, I'm also mostly worried about students tripping over other students' solutions. Are the BLJ filenames precise? For TEALS, different classrooms might have different filename patterns. I looked again today, and even the word "lab" does not seem consistent (e.g. https://snap.berkeley.edu/user?user=loganb26).
TEALS has three different types of assignments. Small warmups are called "Do Now". There are six units, each with a handful of "Lab" and ending in a "Project". See https://tealsk12.gitbook.io/intro-cs/unit_4/lesson_43 for example. You can also click through the other units and lessons to see more do nows, labs, and projects.
How loose can the regular expression be? How bad is it for the regular expression to match a non-TEALS assignment?
A very loose regex for the "Do Now" and "Lab" could be .*[0-6]\.[1-6].*
The projects might be a bit harder to catch. Below are all the project names, but again, the students might save it with a different filename. So far, I've only found published versions of the Project 1 since it is early in the school year. But the next project is Pong, which I'm guessing isn't something you want to filter out.
Project 1: Animated Storytelling
Project 2: Pong
Project 3: Platform Game
Project 4: Guess My Word
Project 5: Space Invaders
Project 6: Final Project
Thoughts? I'm actually a bit more concerned today, since the majority of projects showing up on the homepage under "Latest Projects" today seem to be TEALS and BJC assignments.
Hmm. Even the very loose "Lab" and "Do Now" regex in my previous reply wouldn't catch the following (which seem to actually be TEALS Lab 2.4):
https://snap.berkeley.edu/project?user=digiog&project=Guess%20My%20Number!
Hmm. It'll be a while before we implement anything along these lines. We can certainly check for those specific "Project [#]:" names. I'm more dubious about those #.# names because kids put version numbers on their projects all the time.
Something that's very high on our to-do list may solve this problem a different way: We are going to implement bulk account creation for teachers. Our plan is to recommend strongly to our teachers that they tell students to keep class-related work in the class account and also maintain a personal account for other projects. The class accounts will be temporary and will expire when the class ends. (Of course a student who wants to preserve a project can copy it to their personal account.) Once this is in place, we can just keep class-account projects out of the front page.
But of course that solution won't help in the current semester, so we need a temporary fix too.
Yeah, a regex solution for TEALS assignments will be dubious (relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1171/).
During school hours, the "Latest Projects" are almost exclusively BJC and TEALS assignments. The only two "fixes" I can think of are to do nothing or to remove the "Latest Projects" from the homepage entirely (and replacing with Games curated list? https://snap.berkeley.edu/collection?user=snapcloud&collection=Games). Neither of those "fixes" are great, though.