What is the buggy editor?
The buggy editor is small Python application that the students develop and run. It’s a Flask webserver that lets the user produces a JSON description of a racing buggy which can then be uploaded to the race server. If a student’s buggy has been uploaded to the server, it’s automatically included in the next race.
Front page of the Buggy Editor.
The editor is very limited — all you can do is specify the number of wheels — but it is working. The project tasks guide the students through developing the editor app from this basic program to, potentially, a much more sophisticated one.
The “make buggy” form of the editor. Until the student adds more capability, the editor only accepts the number of wheels.
“Number of wheels” is just one aspect of a racing buggy that students can define. See the full race specs for all the others!
The GitHub repo containing the buggy editor source code is at
github.com/buggyrace/buggy-race-editor
…but — because you should customise it before sharing with your students — we recommend that you do not share that directly (see following section).
Staff and the editor
From the staff point of view, you need to decide the best way for your students to start with the editor code (either as a directory of files, or a Git repo depending on how you want to do it), and the environment in which you want them to do the work. The rest of this Buggy editor section goes into these things in detail.
- Next: Distributing the code