Monday, June 24, 2013

Coding Period:Week 1- June 17 2013 - June 23 2013

After a successful community bonding period it was time to get my hands dirty on code. Community bonding period was a great learning experience. I made several mock-ups for my project, updated my wiki page, started a few discussions and got very good and elaborate suggestions from community members.

Coding period started from 17th June. This week's task was to implement Student UI (User Interface).The first glance of the "Form Creation" code left me puzzled as I had no clue how to pass data, how to add complex things with enabling and disabling features and most importantly how to display the form.Slowly I started to code my form. I mixed it horribly and got lot of errors on my output console. After trying for hours I turned and asked for help from Fred. He was busy with his testing, but still he managed to help me out with forms and gave me basic understanding about forms. He also described how moodle_mod form was different from moodle_form. At last I did have some confidence about generating forms. Later on I tried many things and was happy that they were working.

Later on I started to understand the "Quiz module" coding line by line ( as my module was pretty much on same lines).Initially I failed to comprehend variables like cmid, cm and id, but thanks to Andrew who helped me by explaining the exact meaning and usage of these variablesThanks to the excellent tutorial by him, I now have a very clear picture in my mind.

Now displaying form was an issue that was occurring again and again. This time Tim helped me out of that.He modified a wiki page that gave me a clear picture on how can we display form. Later on he also suggested  not to mix forms and coding handling the form together. A convenient manner to keep code clean was to have our form in another file and code handling the form in another one.

At last my Student UI got ready, I played with many things around and learnt how to deal with forms.Special thanks to Andrew, Fred and Tim who helped me a lot during this. Later on I learnt how to output questions from the question bank. Today I had a meeting with my mentors (Tim an Jean-Michel). There were various issues discussed and the coding done during first week was reviewed. The code so far looked good,needing a bit of proper coding style with some clean up. There were some excellent suggestions made today during hangout and the most important of them was the usage of questions for module from the question bank.

My main task in the upcoming week will be to test the working of new idea that we have thought. I shall describe about it in detail in my upcoming blogs.


1 comment:

  1. Good summary of what you achieved in week 1. Onwards with week 2!

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