Challenge Pool Title
by Instructor

README and outline deadline: YYYY-MM-DD

As part of the 'outline' process, you will need to complete the following tasks:

• Edit this README by filling in the information for step 1.
• Update the requirements.sh file in your practice pool repository on GitHub. Check with your contact as needed.

Challenge development resources

• Authoring documentation: https://authoring.datacamp.com/
• Practice admin page: https://www.datacamp.com/teach/content/challenges
• Technical documentation on challenge types: (in development)

Step 1: Write practice pool outline

How to create the practice pool outline

• Make the outline of concepts in the template below; the outline lists all concepts that are taught in the corresponding course.
• For each concept, specify the concept parts: the important things to understand about this concept (e.g. nuances, syntax, arguments, data types of arguments / return types, differences with other functions, …)
• For each concept part, what is the exercise that is going to test exactly this?
• Add a challenge type to each exercise, ensuring a mix of various challenge types in each chapter.
• A typical challenge pool contains 10 exercises per course chapter.

Your outline

Example from a practice pool on Introduction to Databases in Python

Chapter 1 - Basics of Relational Databases

• MultipleChoiceChallenge: does the student know the different steps of getting data out of a database and the order they go in
  • make connection
  • execute
  • get results
• BlanksChallenge: does the student know the parts of a create_engine function call, and the format of it (in quotations, engine = create_engine(‘sqlite:///census_nyc.sqlite’)
• OutputChallenge: does the student understand that repr output has a particular format, can s/he get the needed information out of it
  • print(repr({{var1}})
  • Var1 → different tables

Step 2: Build exercises for ONE chapter on the Teach Editor

Content vision

it is the goal of practice exercises to

• check if the student has a correct understanding of the course
• check whether the student remembers the most important things taught in the course
• allow the student to exercise until s/he can apply what s/he's learned in the course without having to look things up

Content guidlines

• each pool should have
  • ~ 40 exercises, equally distributed over the different chapters of a course
  • a good mix of the different exercise types
  • a good mix of conceptual and general questions (e.g. why use this package over that package), and detailed questions (e.g. what is the name of the function of package x to do y?)
• each pool should test
  • the most important misunderstandings of a course
  • whether the student remembers the most important concepts and their meaning

Content checklist

• is it clear from the outline which concepts will be tested?
• are the most important things tested?
• is it clear what exactly is going to be tested?
• is there a good mix of exercise types?
• does each exercise check exactly what you want to test?
• are all distractors distracting? Is it realistic someone might think they are the correct answer?
• will the student spend most time answering the question, instead of understanding what is being asked?
• do the different versions of an exercise test the same concept?
• do all sentences start with a capital letter?
• is the code is formatted nicely, using newlines where necessary?
• does the output not contain more than 5 lines?
• do tables contain no more than 3 columns?
• are all exercise keys unique?