How students submit

The race server doesn’t manage or handle submission of the projects or reports. See also: assessment.

Although we anticipate that students will work through the tasks developing their buggy editors, submitting the work is not handled by the race server. Nonetheless the server will display both a deadline and a link if you provide them.

The server can’t really handle this for you because there is so much variation — depending on the level of your students — as to how and what the submission really is. There might or might not be a report involved too — perhaps as the /report route inside each student’s buggy editor. If you’re using GitHub, you might not require explicit submissions from the students. Or you might be snapshot-cloning them at the cutoff date. Or you might require students to make a release.

In general, we anticipate the students’ work — if it is submitted at all — to take the form of the directory (or Git repo) they have been working in.

Set the submission deadline and link

If you enter a submission deadline in the config setting PROJECT_SUBMISSION_DEADLINE, it will be displayed on the race server on the project page (/project).

You can also provide a URL to the submissions page in PROJECT_SUBMISSION_LINK. If it exists, the race server will link to it.

If you want your students to create and submit a zip archive of their work, the server has some settings for showing instructions regarding that too. See the config settings in the “Project” group.

When we ran this project we required students to zip up their work and submit it on the Moodle. This had the benefit of being the way most work in their course in the department would be submitted, but also meant the staff could benefit from the mechanism — including, crucially, the audit trails — for acknowledging submission receipt.
So the submission deadline was displayed on the race server, and the submission link was the URL of the Moodle page where the zip files could be uploaded.