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Buggy Racing

Running the editor locally

The simplest way for students to run their individual buggy editor apps is to execute the Python script on their own machine. This is what we mean by running locally: it’s on localhost, on their own machine (that is, a laptop or desktop computer with Python3 installed — it could be a college machine in their own account).

Flask runs as a webserver on port 5000 so each student can access their app on http://localhost:5000.

In the buggy editor’s app.py, we explicitly set the port number to 5000 even though this is Flask’s default. This is to make it clear to the students where that number is coming from.

The catch with this is it assumes that students have access to such an environment (typically, on their own machine), and it requires the development environment to be set up correctly.

How straightforward it is to set up a working Python environment depends on a number of factors, some of which may be out of your control. Do not underestimate how bewildering — and demoralising — new students may find this process.

It’s probably best to stick to recommending a process that you (and your teaching assistants) are most familiar with. For many people that may be installing Anaconda.

Once the students have Python, and the editor source code, they should be able to install the libraries (most significantly: Flask) with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Students need to initialise the database by running init_db.py. The app will run without it, but fails when it encounters the absence of the buggies table. This is deliberate.

Finally, running the app is probably done with:

python app.py

All of this is covered in more detail in the editor’s README (which, at this stage, will also be on the student’s own machine).

We first ran this project during the UK’s full Covid lockdown — so, 100% online. The complications arising from students attempting different Python installations on different operating systems was far from straightforward. (Variations within Windows caused us the most trouble). Much will depend on what exposure your students already have to navigating file systems, using the command line, or simply being able to articulate their set-up problems or interpret error messages.

The first phase (especially tasks 0-GET and 0-RUN) is about getting past this milestone. It’s significant that getting the code running is itself part of the task list. Don’t dismiss this — there’s a lot to understand for new students in this process, and for many of them it can be the most abstract part of the whole project.

If your students need support with some of the computer basics, it might help to point them at the CompSci superbasics website.
You can host your own copy of the superbasics site (it’s available under an MIT license), which means you can customise it to. If you do this, be sure to set the config setting SUPERBASICS_URL to point at your hosted version (it’s used in a few places, including some tech notes).