Principles of Programming test and exam deployment

These instructions are designed to deploy a Principles of Programming exam environment on an Imperial College London ICT-managed Windows system.

Start Git and VS Code

Use the Software Hub to launch Git, and Visual Studio Code. Just leave Git running in the background, we will access it via VS Code.

Run the deployment script

There is a GitHub repository containing a Python package, a Visual Studio Workspace, and a deployment script. Running the deployment script requires network access to GitHub.com. This is not required during the exam.

Open the Visual Studio Code window. If the terminal is not visible at the bottom of the screen, drag up the bottom bar to reveal it. You now need to launch a Git Bash terminal. Use the down arrow to the right of the + in the bar at the top of the terminal to access this option. The new terminal will be recognisable by the $ Bash prompt in place of the > Powershell prompt.

In the terminal, run the following command to download and execute the deployment script:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/object-oriented-python/pop_exam_config/main/setup_exam.sh | bash

This will:

• create a folder called pop_exam
• clone the pop_exam_config repository.
• set up a Python venv called PoP_venv
• install the pop_exam_config Python package, hence installing all the required Python packages.

Deploy the exam paper

Copy the folder containing the exam materials to the name exam_paper in the pop_exam folder.

Launch the exam workspace.

In Visual Studio Code, open pop_exam/pop_exam_config/PoP_exam.code-workspace.

Next, click on the blue button at the bottom right of the editor window to open the workspace.

When prompted, agree to trust the files in the workspace.

When prompted, agree to install the Flake8 extension.

Testing the installation

This section is specific to testing with the 2023 exam repository.

In the Visual Studio Code PoP_exam workspace, open a Bash terminal (same procedure as above). Activate the Virtual environment:

source ../PoP_venv/Scripts/activate

Change to the reference solutions branch of the exam paper:

git checkout reference_solution

Run the tests provided:

python -m pytest

The expected output is 71 passing tests:

======================================================== test session starts =========================================================
platform win32 -- Python 3.11.4, pytest-7.4.1, pluggy-1.3.0
rootdir: C:\Users\dham\pop_exam\exam_paper
configfile: pytest.ini
collected 71 items

tests\test_q1.py ..................................                                                                             [ 47%]
tests\test_q2.py ............                                                                                                   [ 64%]
tests\test_q3.py ............                                                                                                   [ 81%]
tests\test_q4.py .............                                                                                                  [100%]

========================================================= 71 passed in 1.12s =========================================================