flo-check-homework 0.9.12

A program that allows to run other programs only after a set of questions have been correctly answered

A way to consolidate calculus and grammar skills

General idea

flo-check-homework presents one or more questionnaires to the user. Once all questions have been answered, and if the score exceeds a predefined threshold, a special button is enabled. When pressed, this button launches the program (with optional arguments) that was specified on flo-check-homework’s command line.

A “magic formula” button allows one to bypass the test in case the pupil has already done his homework in another way. It also makes it possible to exit the program immediately.

Indeed, flo-check-homework refuses to quit immediately unless option -e was given or a sufficient score was obtained; this is done so as to avoid the children validating the whole questionnaire with incorrect answers only to get corrections that they can blindly copy after rerunning the program. For the same reason, some of the question generators purposedly don’t remember incorrect answers, in contrast with the initial design.

Currently, the questions are designed to help consolidate simple additions, substractions, multiplications, euclidian divisions and conjugations of French verbs. The questionnaires are built at run-time and can be customized to some extent via a configuration file (~/.config/Florent Rougon/flo-check-homework.ini on Unix-like systems). It is easy for a Python programmer to add new question generators, questionnaires or subquestionnaires.

The ItemGenerator class, which is the basis for many question generators, has the following properties:

• starts with items that have been incorrectly answered in previous sessions

• cycles through all items but does not yield an item that has already been seen in the current session (unless all items have been seen)

• Seen objects (used to remember which items of a given type have been seen in the current session) can be shared between several question generators. This avoids asking the same question twice in case several question generators are likely to generate the same question.

It is possible to setup launcher scripts that call flo-check-homework with the appropriate parameters depending on the script (and parameters passed to the script). The flo-check-homework-decorate-games program from the ‘tools’ directory is provided to help automate such a setup. Basically, you write a list of programs/games in an XML file which we’ll call DATAFILE for the sake of the example. You may look at flo-check-homework-decorate-games.xml from the tools/flo-check-homework-decorate-games folder or run ‘flo-check-homework-decorate-games –help’ for an example of such a file. Once you have a proper DATAFILE, run the following command as a user who has permission to write to /usr/local/games:

# flo-check-homework-decorate-games /path/to/DATAFILE

This will create an appropriate launcher script in /usr/local/games for every program listed in DATAFILE. If /usr/local/games is prepended to the system PATH, then the launcher scripts will take precedence over the corresponding game executables when a user tries to run a game, unless a full path to the game executable is specified.

This also works if the game is started from the freedesktop menu, because freedesktop .desktop files usually don’t specify a full path to the executable (when they do, the only recourse is to fix the .desktop file manually and report a bug to the game in question). The format of .desktop files is described in the Desktop Entry specification.

flo-check-homework-decorate-games has options to customize the paths such as /usr/games and /usr/local/games, as well as options to choose which locale to use when a launcher script starts flo-check-homework, and when flo-check-homework runs a game. See the output of ‘flo-check-homework-decorate-games –help’ for more information.

Requirements

The following software is required to run flo-check-homework:

• Python 3.1 or later in the 3 series;

• Qt 4.8 or later;

• PyQt 4.10.3 is known to work, version 4.9 should be enough and older versions will most probably not work with this version of flo-check-homework.

Version 0.9.12 of flo-check-homework has been tested on Linux with Python 3.3.2, Qt 4.8.2 and PyQt 4.10.3. It should work on any platform with the aforementioned dependencies installed, but trivial bugs are likely to pop up on non-Unix platforms as no test whatsoever has been done on them. Please report.

For installation instructions, please refer to INSTALL.txt.

Running flo-check-homework from the Git repository

flo-check-homework is maintained in a Git repository that can be cloned with:

git clone https://github.com/frougon/flo-check-homework

It is possible to run flo-check-homework from a clone of that repository, but two things that are not part of it have to be set up in order for everything to work properly:

• the flo_check_homework/images directory tree containing “reward images” must be copied from a release tarball, otherwise there will be an error when all questions have been answered and the program tries to show an image;

• the .qm files (used for translations) that are relevant to your locale settings must be generated from the corresponding .ts source files; this can be done automatically with the Makefile shipped in the top-level directory of the Git repository, provided you have GNU Make (run ‘make’).

Additional notes

Since flo-check-homework-decorate-games is currently only able to generate shell scripts, it is not expected to be of any use on platforms that cannot run them. This means that you can fill in questionnaires on these platforms but can’t expect to be able to run the desired program/games from flo-check-homework after a good enough work without some adaptation for such platforms. (For Windows platforms, one might use Cygwin or adapt flo-check-homework-decorate-games to generate batch files, or something else, let Windows experts decide in this matter…)

All images, as the rest of the package, are free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG-free for short). I wanted to use photos of angry-looking dogs easily found with Google Images, but unfortunately, they all appear to be non-free. If you have good suggestions of free software-licensed images to improve this program, please advise.