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CheckIt

Platform for authoring free and open randomized exercises for practice and assessment.

Looking for sample exercises?

Sample exercise banks are hosted for the public at https://checkit.clontz.org.

Getting started as an author

The ☑️It platform runs completely inside your web browser, powered by CoCalc.com! Open a template project and click the green "Open with one click!" button. (CoCalc trial accounts take some time to load and compute, so consider purchasing a CoCalc subscription if you like using CheckIt.)

Our community of authors and developers is organized in the #checkit-app channel of the Mastery Grading Slack workspace. Come join us!

Generating an exercise bank for Canvas

In a CoCalc project (see previous section), open the banks/build.ipynb notebook and run the cell, making sure fixed=False and public=False.

Inside the bank folder, a build folder should be present. Select the qti-bank folder and download the zip file to your computer. This file can be uploaded to Canvas via these instructions at community.canvaslms.com.

Developing the CheckIt platform

The following lines will get you set up to start developing. Note that the Jupyter notebooks used to generate/preview exercise banks change every time they are used, so we ignore those changes in general.

git clone git@github.com:StevenClontz/checkit.git
git update-index --skip-worktree banks/*.ipynb

If one of the bank notebooks actually needs to be updated, copy Code cells to new ones (without running) and delete old ones for a clean result. Then do the following.

git update-index --no-skip-worktree banks/*.ipynb
git add banks/*.ipynb
git commit -m "Updated bank notebooks."
git update-index --skip-worktree banks/*ipynb

Why "CheckIt"?

I used to call this platform "Mastr/MasterIt", but switched to ☑️It/CheckIt. While the problem banks on this platform (so far) are designed with Mastery/Pointless Grading in mind, there's no hard-requirement that they be used for this purpose. But as Jean-Sébastien pointed out, "CheckIt" emphasizes the purpose of the platform: to check student understanding, while also reflecting the use of checkmarks in many objective-based grading systems.