exercise/lesson validation (dressed as a "virtual customer" regarding the user experience)

[serapath]

@todo

• add technical concept around how to enable this without centralised servers
• implement infrastructure
• create task creating virtual-customers and pay with a made up "play token"
  • think about play token mechanics

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Idea

1. The workshop app lists tasks (exercises, exams, ...)
2. Users choose a task and solve the code inside the editor and then submit
3. In case of exercises, the submitted code is checked/validated by a bot
   • if pass => bot merged the users pull request to solve the exercise
   • if fail => bot comments on pull request and asks user to try again
4. User codes until pull request is merged and gets rewarded (eventually with a payment)

goal:
Refining this workflow for users helps us to tune our tooling until it is good enough to add exams (=paid tasks) where the bot is replaced with a real "customer" who wants to outsource work and pays the learner.

---

@bit-shift

Related

• https://hackmd.io/zADA78_uQeWmBp_IXQcIUA?both
• https://nixcloud.io/tour/?id=2
• https://tour.golang.org/flowcontrol/3
• https://github.com/bit-shift/solidity-tour/
• https://bit-shift.github.io/solidity-tour/steps/1/

more

• https://www.katacoda.com/docs/scenarios/displaying-ports
• https://www.katacoda.com/docs/scenarios/pre-init
• https://github.com/katacoda/scenario-examples/blob/master/scenario-with-editor/step1.md
• https://github.com/katacoda/scenario-examples
• https://www.katacoda.com/

[serapath]

implementation inspiration

• https://github.com/workshopper/workshopper-exercise
• https://github.com/workshopper/workshopper
• https://github.com/workshopper/workshopper-adventure
• https://github.com/linclark/lin-clark.com/blob/master/content/blog/2014/07/01/authoring-nodejs-workshopper-lessons.md

[serapath]

INSPIRATION (helper librarys for AST checking)

These are used for JavaScript, but to have something similar for solidity could be very useful

• https://www.npmjs.com/package/astral
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/ast-matcher
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/match-ast
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/es-pattern-match (less powerful, but easier for teachers to use?)
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/aster-equery

If so - we could brainstorm about the API and how to make it module (e.g. AST tree walker, etc...)
Also - the alternative to a convenient AST checking library would be to focus on the compiler output and compare metadata and abi, but this won't help us a lot when it comes to figure out details about implemented methods :-) ...so yeah, what do you think?