[Seaside] state of the aubergine

[Tim Rowledge]

Julian Fitzell <julian@beta4.com> is claimed by the authorities to have written:


> > Questions will (initially, there are dreams of more sophistication)
> > consist of a text explaining the problem and a short (3-5) list of
> > possible answers. The neat trick is that the list of answers will be
> > re-ordered randomly each time they are presented to avoid students
> > remembering "oh, that one was 'b' last time" so some way to remember the
> > ordering used is needed. I'm assuming a session related var can do this.
> 
> Ordering is non-issue.  If you create a list of radio buttons, you give 
> it a Collection of items.  The actual item associated with the selected 
> radio button is given to you so you can do a straight comparison.  Or 
> even just have a flag in the PossibleAnswer object that indicates 
> whether it is correct.  All depends how you implement your data objects 
> of course.
Err, I'm not sure I follow you here. I'm going to be randomly permuting
the list of possible answers each time the question is displayed. I had
been 'returning' a,b, etc as the result chosen and worrying about how to
'remember' what permutation was relevant to each occasion (obviously for
five answers there's 120 possible permutations) and de-permuting. Are
you suggesting that I can 'return' the entire answer string? That would
certainly save one problem but might be painful if answer were big
(maybe an image?). Or is there something else? Obviously it has to be
hidden from the student to stop them cheating.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim@sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.  - Brian Reid