Tools§
CodeHelp, Starburst, and Gen-ed§
CodeHelp is a web application that uses large language models (LLMs) to help computer science students with programming without just handing them a solution. It's designed to be used as an additional form of learning support alongside TAs and instructors.
Starburst is a similar LLM-powered application that contains learning tools not solely focused on computer science.
Both CodeHelp and Starburst are open source, part of the Gen-Ed framework for building web applications that use generative AI in education.
The code is hosted on GitHub: Gen-Ed.
Clicker§
Clicker (just a working title, not really named yet) is a simple classroom response system. As an instructor, you create a room, students join via QR code on mobile devices or by typing a link, and you can quickly and easily ask questions, collect responses, and show the results to the class.
Banner Fixer§
Banner, IWU's student information system, has a pretty bad UI. So I wrote a userscript to fix lots of UI/UX annoyances and issues.
Some of the improvements:
- Provides a full table of your advisees right on the initial "dashboard" page with links to their profiles. (Instead of multiple clicks to get to a table with just the first 10 advisees.)
- Removes unneeded columns from the class search and resizes others to make useful content visible.
- Rewrites enrollment and waitlist numbers to be more immediately useful.
- Defaults to viewing 50 items at once in tables where Banner defaults to 10 and only even provides the option to see up to 20 per page.
To use it, first install the Tampermonkey browser extension. Then, after the extension is installed and active, use the link below to install the script. The improvements will then show up in IWU's Banner site automatically. Feel free to report problems to me or just let me know if there is some additional feature you might find useful.
Download/Install Banner Fixer: Banner_Fixer.user.js
Code2tex§
Code2tex was written to help my TAs and I grade programming assignments. It makes a simple but nicely-formatted LaTeX file from source code, with basic headers and syntax highlighting. The .tex file can then be easily made into a PDF, making it easy to mark up the submission in software like PDF-XChange Viewer or Xournal and return an electronic copy to the student.
Example: hello_worlds.pdf, generated from a variety of Hello World programs.
The code is hosted on GitHub: code2tex.