Availability update 21.02.2022

Currently development of Scala ZONE is put on-hold due to other projects we are pursuing. We do not have any plans to add more content to the courses anytime soon. Additionaly, Scala ZONE website is currently offline. It's not the end of life of this platform - it may come back in a new edition in the future. All readers all warmly welcome to read and contribute to the courses here, on GitHub. We encourage everyone who wants to contact us to write an email to contact@scala.zone.

ScalaZONE Content

This repository contains the content of the ScalaZONE website. It stores both lesson text and course structure. Everyone is welcome to make PRs with suggestions.

Licence

Content is distributed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.

Deployment triggers

• Every commit to the develop branch updates the content in the development environment.
• Every commit to the stage branch updates the content in the staging environment.
• Every commit to the main branch updates the content in the production environment.

Only the production environment is accessible to the public. People outside of VirtusLab and Propensive do not have access to the develop and stage environments, but access will be provided on request.

Structure overview

This is an outline repository fulfilling structure requirements for a course. The following files and directories are required:

• images - directory with images used by course; NOTE that the final path differs from the path within the course repository as follows: /images/<path> -> /api/content/courseImages/<course-id>/<path>
• topics - directory with topics
• advanced.json - course level description
• beginner.json - course level description
• index.json - course description
• intermediate.json - course level description

The branch names correspond to the deployment environments as it is described in the section above.

Courses

Courses are the top-level entity in the ScalaZONE material structure. Their structure is stored in the root directory of the course repository. The index.json file stores a list with all available courses. For each course there is a directory named after the course id that contains the course structure. Basic course data is stored in the index.json file in this directory. Here is the Course JSON type structure:

Field name	Type	Description
name	String	Name of the course that is visible on the website
courseLevelTypes	List of strings	List of available levels of the course. Levels are described in the next paragraph
image	String, Optional	Path to the image for the course; it has to refer to an image by the path mapped to content root repository
video	String, Optional	Video link that is displayed on the course overview page
description	String	Description of the course
language	String	Language in which the course content is written, e.g. English
scope	List of strings	Scope of the course; these are presented in the bullet list on the course overview page
sponsoredBy	String, Optional	Id of company sponsoring the course

Course Levels

Course levels are parts of the course that are suited for users starting with different ability levels. There are three levels that are possible to add to a course:

• Beginner
• Intermediate
• Advanced

To add a level to a course, it must be present in the courseLevelTypes field in the course's index.json file. Level can be configured using <level>.json file in the course directory, where <level> is either beginner, intermediate or advanced. Here is the Level JSON structure:

Field name	Type	Description
name	String	Name of the course level that is visible on the level page
description	String	Description of the course level
ranges	List of TopicRange objects	Defines lessons and topics that are present in the level

And the TopicRange type has the following structure in json:

Field name	Type	Description
topicId	String	Id of the topic
lessonStart	String	Id of the first lesson of the topic included in the level
lessonEnd	String	Id of the last lesson of the topic included in the topic

Topic ranges define what topics and lessons are present in a course level. By specifying this, we are able to use only a slice of a topic for a particular course level. These slices may, however, overlap between level, so that a particular lesson may appear in more than one level.

Topics

Topics are ordered collections of lessons. Their index is stored in the topics/index.json file. The structure of a single topic is defined in the index.json file inside the specific directory named after the topic in the topics directory. This index.json file has following JSON structure:

Field name	Type	Description
name	String	Name of the topic that is visible on the website
order	Int	Order number; allows organizing topics
description	String	Description of the topic
lessons	List of Lesson	Lessons that this topic consists of

Lessons

The Lesson JSON type structure:

Field name	Type	Description
id	String	Id of the lessons
title	String	Title of the lesson; the name that is visible on the website
order	Int	Order number; allows organizing lessons
description	String	Description of the lesson (about 1-3 sentences); it is visible in the Google search results
authorIds	List of strings, Optional	Ids of the lesson's authors
video	Lesson video, Optional	URL to an embeddable lesson video
duration	Int, Optional	Expected duration of lesson completion in minutes
prerequisites	List of LessonPrerequisites	Ids of lessons that are prerequisites of this lesson
comingSoon	Boolean, Optional	Marks lesson as coming soon; false by default; NOTE: (possibly empty) {id}.md file is required in any case

The LessonPrerequisite JSON type structure:

Field name	Type	Description
topicId	String, Optional	Id of the topic of the lesson to depend upon; if empty indicates it's same topic as lesson in which this prerequisite is placed
lessonId	String	Id of the lesson to depend upon
reason	String, Optional	Description of the reason of this dependency

A lesson's content files are present in the topics directory, within a directory specific to the lesson's topic. The content file must be named after the lesson id and have a .md file extension. This file defines the text and questions that user sees after entering the lesson page. You can use most of the markdown features inside of it, including tables, images and a special syntax for videos.

Video syntax

To embed a video inside a lesson you can use the following syntax:

[![alt text](alt image link)](embeddable video link)

Questions section

The first part of every lesson's markdown file is the lesson's content: the text that is visible on the lessons page, and is meant to explain a concept specific to this lesson. After this first part, it is possible to include questions testing the user's understanding at the end of the lesson. To do so, first introduce the questions section separator: ?---? and write your questions after it. At this moment there are two types of questions: single answer questions (using radio buttons) and multiple answer questions (using checkboxes). Every question begins with a single-hash markdown header, for example:

# What is 1+1?

It is possible to include code blocks, tables and other markdown elements that are not children of the header element, but they must follow the header element.

After the question text, you must provide the question's answer choices, by specifying an unordered markdown list. It can be defined either using dashes (-) or asterisks (*). However, the character you choose determines the type of the question. Dashes are used for single answer questions and asterisks for multiple answer questions. To indicate whether the answer is correct you should use the markdown checkboxes that follow the list character. Two examples below exemplify this behaviour:

Single answer question:

# What is the result of expression below?

```
2+2
```

 - [ ] 3
 - [X] 4
 - [ ] 7

Multiple answer question:

# What is the result of expression below?

```
2+2
```

 * [ ] 3
 * [X] 4
 * [ ] 7
 * [X] Four

To summarize, let's look on a sample lesson containing some mock content and two questions:

# Arithmetic

## Addition

To add two numbers ...

## Subtraction

...

?---?

# What is the result of the expression, `2+2`?

 - [ ] 3
 - [X] 4
 - [ ] 7

# What is the result of expression below?

```
2+2
```

 * [ ] 3
 * [X] 4
 * [ ] 7
 * [X] Four