Runestone Interactive Tools and Content

Build Status

Documentation

Documentation for the project is on our official documentation site This includes the list of dependencies you need to install in order to build the books included in the repository, or to set up a complete server environment.

The Runestone Tools are not only good for authoring the textbooks contained in this site, but can also be used for:

• Making your own lecture materials
• Making online quizzes for use in class
• Creating online polls for your course

Whats New

• We just recently updated the activecode directive to support two new languages. Javascript and HTML.

How to Contribute

1. Get a github (free) account.
2. Make a fork of this project. That will create a repository in your account for you to have read/write access to. Very nice, complete instructions for making a fork are here: https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo
3. Clone the repository under your account to your local machine.
4. Check the issues list, or add your own favorite feature. commit and pull to your fork at will!
5. test
6. Make a Pull Request. This will notify me that I should look at your changes and merge them into the main repository.
7. Repeat!

How to Contribute $$

As our popularity has grown we have server costs. We were also able to make great progress during the Summer of 2013 thanks to a generous grant from ACM-SIGCSE that supported one of our undergraduate students. It would be great if we could have a student working on this all the time.

If this system or these books have helped you, please consider making a small donation using gittip

More Documentation

I have begun a project to document the Runestone Interactive tools

• All of the Runestone Interactive extensions to sphinx:

  • Activecode -- Interactive Python in the browser
  • Codelens -- Step through code examples and see variables change
  • mchoicemf -- multiple choice questions with feedback
  • mchoicema -- multiple choice question with multiple answers and multiple feedback
  • fillintheblank -- fill in the blank questiosn with regular expression matching answers
  • parsonsproblem -- drag and drop blocks of code to complete a simple programming assignment
  • datafile -- create datafiles for activecode

• How to write your own extension for Runestone Interactive

Creating Your Own Textbook

To find instructions on using the Runestone Tools to create your own interactive textbook, see the file in this directory named README_new_book.rst.

Browser Notes

Note, because this interactive edition makes use of lots of HTML 5 and Javascript I highly recommend either Chrome, or Safari. Firefox 6+ works too, but has proven to be less reliable than the first two. I have no idea whether this works at all under later versions of Internet Explorer.

Notes on running under Windows

As I mentioned up front, I'm not a windows user, But, others have figured out how to get the whole works running under windows anyway. Here are some tips:

1. In models.0 you will want to add this:

 try:
     from os import uname
 except:
     def uname():
         return ['0', 'windows']


Now you can add a test for windows, and set your database settings accordingly.

2. In the pavement.py file we use cp to copy some files into place. I think the equivalent on Windows is copy or copy.exe.