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 and/or poster involved too — perhaps as the /report route inside each student’s buggy editor, or separate documents. If the students are using version control, 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, and possibly additional documents.
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.
Customising deadlines and links for individual students
You can override the project submission deadline or submission link for individual students. You might want to do this if any of your students have different deadlines (for example, if you are handling extensions or resits). This behaviour is not enabled by default: you need to set one or any of IS_PROJECT_SUBMISSION_DEADLINE_PER_STUDENT, IS_PROJECT_SUBMISSION_LINK_PER_STUDENT, or IS_PROJECT_NOTICE_PER_STUDENT to enable it.
Once you’ve done so, the appropriate fields are available when you edit the user:
Values you enter here override the project-wide settings (if any). Conversely, any you leave empty will inherit the values (if any) of the Project config settings PROJECT_SUBMISSION_DEADLINE and PROJECT_SUBMISSION_LINK.
You can also set a PROJECT_NOTICE, which is a text displayed on the /project page that you can use to give additional information about the project. We anticipate this being used mostly to display a custom (per-user) message to students with an overridden deadline or link.
If you’ve enabled any of these IS_PROJECT_*_PER_USER settings, none of them will be displayed on the /projects page except when a user is logged in. The dashboard shows a summary (count) of the numbers of such overridden values (on active students) is provided on the dashboard. You can see which users have overrides by looking at the Users page in the admin.