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FlyingFish manual v1.51

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1. esent tentent ttntn tete tete tenth tette tete tenet 8 5 GMT Offset 8 5 persistent 8 The Done mechanism c cssssssssessssssesessssesesssscsesessssesesseassessessacssssassesecsesesessenssssssnsassesseasssssesseassesseusacsssssasaesecseacseensasseseeseacsssees 8 1 Anapplet question is DOME sssccsssccssdescsessccassehceasssesscessdseacstscchsuaseastebtosvecctsnscvasistodscccsaboccvaactdserstistualedaesthassseavnsoussstoas 8 2 A Multi choice question is Done On line adminstrative tOOI S ccccccsesesssssssssssscssscscsescsssessssessscscscssscscscscsesssesesessscacscscsessssassesessusssseseseaescasscscscseseseseeseneseacaces 10 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION iv 9 1 Edit C0 TANG NONE 9 2 DDI OCUOLY M T T X M 9 3 MIETEN E TEE The Forum eese 9 1 Adding a message to a Forum 9 3 Anonymity and carelessness 9 2 The Forum change list 9 3 Editing POt cciesouconuedecemt om otto utente timidis taii Tan deett t RE 9 5 Behind the scenes where is the Forum data s sesseeeete tette tnt tentent 75 Introduction to Java and FlyingFish the single answer question type 9 1 Standalone Javaren T 9 2 The Single answer question standalone shell ee
2. Logout Go to next problem View your information record Welcome Administrator This is the first time you have logged in Auei Which is a Japanese greeting to someone you have never met before Before you go further you ll have to make some changes to your student record Click here Dr ANN Sot naf Sox Usos edu au FIGURE6 The basic front page Follow the link marked Click Here and you will see the information record page Students are automatically directed to this page if FlyingFish notices ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 15 anything odd about their records for example if the password is missing or is too short Netyrapr feiminixtratar admin Ub Loco lnformation about Administrator Youll have to choose a new password Vaec TD aimi ANAE Alinibinoncr F r nione n IE gy OC his en SE Ae AATE RT b loner rider delay Faime racus ainixirtrator Farrwcri Io Typa ycorgurrwcrd apuia wsssa FIGURE7 Setting your preferred name and password Enter a new preferred name and password enter the password twice and click the Submit button If your preferred name and password are accepted then the error message at the top of the page will disappear Follow the link to the Front Page You will see something like this Taroa JE Locekor rio 107120735 52 241 DECIR arire retard k arzaga Wabbimi Condect People Tolle Pages Dcenlaad Chanak Lageut Go be next prob
3. will continue to work ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 43 Thu 31 December 1999 6 00PM The order of the elements in a date string is not important and upper or lower case are acceptable Smart date correction If the day of the week is given in a date string it has a higher significance than the day of the month In cases where the date is internally inconsistent as in the above example the 31 Dec 1999 was actually a Friday the date is adjusted to make the day of the week correct In other words the above example will be corrected internally to Thu 30 December 1999 6 00PM Missing date elements If any of the elements of a date string are missing the current server value is substituted instead This substitution behaviour can This is actually a very useful behaviour Consider the date string Fri 20 May 6 00PM The year is not specified So the server will insert the current year value e g 2000 or 2001 Furthermore since the string does have the day of the week the server will choose the Friday in the current year closest to the 20th of May If you wish you can exploit this behaviour while setting your deadlines Set them like the above example and they will be correct or very nearly correct every year without adjustment 6 9 Functions There are cases where insertion of a file or variable is not enough sometimes we would like to insert something which is calculated from other known val
4. However this would not work because the FlyingFish server will interpret this as a request for an ordinary web page it will try to find the file FlyingFish htdocs Authoring JavaQuestionsI index html Which is not at all what you were hoping to see and probably does not even exist To distinguish requests for task pages from requests for ordinary web pages an addition to the URL is needed See Figure 15 CGI name Branch http teach239 mech uwa edu au 8080 jellyfish rasputin me 1 112 kinetics Cmd LOGO Server address being user Query string optional optional FIGURE 15 Parts of a URL The FlyingFish server sees the keyword jellyfish after the web server address so it knows that you want to see something generated on the fly from files in the task tree rather than some ordinary web page The server parses the remainder of the request to pick out further detail such as the path to the task and something called the query string more about this later The path to a particular task has a special name it is called the Branch ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 25 The FlyingFish server has its own default file convention Confusingly the default file for task tree web pages is called body html rather than index html The FlyingFish will thus interpret the URL of Figure 12 as a request for a document at FlyingFish task me1112 kinetics body html But the FlyingFish s
5. Port Traditional web service 0 Don t use this I m sure it is reserved for some obscure IP function Besides it s downright weird 21 Telnet 80 HTTP web 8080 HTTP web if port 80 is in use Also sometimes used by Proxy services 8888 Often used by Proxy services I am uncomfortable with the use of any low number as a port number because I am paranoid about accidentally using someone else s standard port I make my port numbers either 80 or in the range 8000 8999 If you ever do accidentally use someone else s port number it is not really all that serious as it can only affect services hosted by your computer It might mean that some other server program on your computer or the FlyingFish itself if it happen to come alive second will not be able to start properly If you are in full control of the computer you probably know what services are hosted by it and what port numbers the services want to use Sometimes you will want to use one of the standard port numbers For example if you are setting up an instance of FlyingFish to be the main web server on your computer there is no harm in allowing it to use port 80 This will mean that the address of your FlyingFish will be simplified web browsers assume that if the port qualifier e g 8060 is missing that port 80 should be used In other words if you run your FlyingFish on port 80 the user needs only to type htips 130 95 52 28 to make contac
6. FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 88 Again be careful to distinguish between doughut labels and mask colour names particularly if some of your labels and colour names are the same The meaning of the above is If the user puts the doughnut with this label on the mask colour with this name we will give them the following message Generally the feedback message string can be anything you like However it should be kept short because this is the string that will appear in the little pop up when the mouse is over an incorrect doughnut If there were too many words in the message they would not all fit on screen and the meaning would be lost Note that you can break a feedback message across several lines i e you can put a carriage return in the message using the escape sequence n Those of you who program in C C or Java will recognise this as the newline character escape sequence There is one special feedback string Correct If you use this string you are telling the applet that the combination of label and mask colour is correct You can have additional words after Correct if you wish e g Correct What a legend and it will still be treated as Correct You can also mark several label name combinations as Correct if you wish and all will be accepted Note that the label colour name pairs form a kind of look up table spanning all the possible combinations Note that we have not defined the mask colour w
7. The next chapter contains some information about the approach to writing a new problem type and you may be able to invent your own version of CJavaMicrograph or something even better based on that To create a new drag and drop problem you need to create only three new files The problem picture called problem gif or problem jpg An additional picture called the mask mask gif and A text file called assessor txt ADVANCE EDUCATION FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 84 As an example in the following sections I will explain the steps to create the following drag and drop problem from the Engineering field of Statics Torce Oien ion compres ion FIGURE 24 An example drag and drop problem from Statics 10 1 The problem image Can be anything you like I created this artwork for the Statics problem using Adobe Illustrator Force FIGURE 25 The problem picture for a problem in Statics The problem picture can be in either GIF or JPEG format GIF is best for images with larges areas of solid colour like Figure 26 JPEG works best for photographic images Your picture must have the name problem gif or problem jpg Note that the suffix is jpg and NOT jpeg ADVANCE EDUCATION FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 85 10 2 Create the mask The mask image must be the same pixel dimensions as the problem image It is an image containing blobs or regions of solid colour that correspond to
8. flexible but it can also be used as a way of specifiying the content type of a block of data Well behaved web servers are supposed to send a MIME type 12 Note that even if this control were unintentionally shown to students this would NOT mean that students could change the setting By default students cannot change any variable values unless there are special permission UDB keys in the task tree 13 See Borenstein N and Freed N Request for Comments 1341 MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies June 1992 ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 53 along with every block of served data so that your browser will know exactly what it is receiving So the question is how does the FlyingFish know what MIME type to return with every file To make this discussion more concrete consider the following URL http dynamics mech uwa edu au jellyfish baking_230 myPicture GIF This is a request for a GIF file The FlyingFish server at the given address will return the contents of the file called myPicture GIF which is hopefully in the directory task baking 230 But it must also send a MIME type along with the picture file data What MIME type will it send The answer is that the FlyingFish makes use of UDB files with the name mapping which can live anywhere in the task tree Here is an example of a mapping file w
9. right off the CD regardless of the drive letter of the CD drive on the particular computer you are using Of course if the user directories are also on the CD ROM then user progress data cannot be saved but this is OK if you are only trying to produce a demo I burn a CD version of a site before giving a presentation about it this guarantees that every time I start it up it will behave exactly like the previous time It is possible to have several instances of FlyingFish on the same host computer see http port below and these instances can even share some files on the hard disk For example it is OK to have two copies of FlyingFish each of which uses the same htdocs directory It is also OK to share task directories and even user directories although it would be unusual to want to do this Note that if files are shared by several instances of FlyingFish there may be occasions where a file is updated by one instance but is not immediately read in by the other as a result of file caching If you have an application that seems to require simultaneous dual FlyingFishes talk to Advance Education technical staff because there may be a simpler way to do the job 8 2 farm Trees Farms Fish What next The farm is a suite of software developed by Dr Kevin Judd which allows FlyingFish to communicate with Mathematica kernels on another computer At the time of writing it must be another computer because the Farm software is UNIX ba
10. u user Name Family SIZE 20 gt lt TD gt lt TR gt lt TR gt lt TD gt Given name lt TD gt lt TD gt lt INPUT TYPE text NAME user Name Given VALUE u user Name Given SIZE 20 gt lt TD gt lt TR gt lt TR gt lt TD gt Courses lt TD gt lt TD gt lt INPUT NAME user course 600101 TYPE hidden VALUE null gt lt INPUT TYPE checkbox u user course 600101 CHECKED Value 1 NAME u user course 600101 gt Engineering 101 lt TD gt lt TR gt lt TABLE gt 7 5 Mapping files setting MIME behaviour When you look at a web page you are actually seeing something generated by a web browser based on one or more files The source files typically include An HTML page which provides text and can also include embedded pictures sounds movies and so on An additional file for each picture sound or movie It is worth remembering that because of this each picture you include on a web page produces a separate hit on your web server In its original form the Web was text only but over the years a great range of additional file types have become accepted and widely used The most common are pictures GIF and JPEG format mainly but there are now hundreds of supported file types To help reduce the chance of confusion with data of some kind being mistaken for data of another kind there is a system of file type naming called MIME 3 MIME is actually a huge set of standards and is very
11. you will need to import all the classes from c FlyingFish htdocs JellyfishClient Questions3 VellyfishclientN of course your actual Questions directory could live somewhere else this is just an example Change the line public class Thermo21 extends Standalone public class Thermo21 extends CSingleAnswerQuestion to Compile your code Put the compiled class file Thermo21 class in c FlyingFish htdocs JellyfishClient Questions4 Refer to the new class in a body html document ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 82 10 Writing your own compatible Java applet It s possible to do great things with the humble Single answer question type as we have been demonstrating in Engineering subjects for years However if you have a vision of a new type of problem you will need to create the interface in Java and then wire it up to the FlyingFish server 10 1 Write your own incompatible Java applet Your work is to create something that will show the student something ask a question get some input and assess whether it is correct or not Easy No definitely not easy but worth doing anyway The point here is that you should thoroughly test your applet while it is in a stand alone form It is still possible to debug an applet once it is networked but it is a little more difficult To make this discussion more concrete let s use an example Let s suppose you have developed an appl
12. Bain fla nia El ix Clases 1 B B Chas oo mm FIGURE21 Source files to compile Rect1010 class Note that the only actual Java source file is Rect1010 java All the other files are compiled class files or other things like HTML Here is a picture of the directory structure I work with on a Win32 computer poe Sn FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 78 EE El codebase iellyfishclient G Documentation G Sing amp ns Data E htdocs LOA tack i FIGURE22 Arrangement of project and compiled files J codebase Documentation Sing ns Data ka Rect1010 java Sing amp ns mcp single html The important point here is that your project is supposed to produce a single output file called Rect1010 class and put that file in a directory called codebase The codebase directory already has a subdirectory called jellyfishclient which contains the compiled classes e g CEngAnswer class These can be seen as library files Note that the codebase folder also contains the image for the problem problem gif and also a little GIF containing a symbol used in the problem DELTAS GIF 8 4 Understanding the single answer question code example Now for the explanation Here is the source file Rect1010 java with some extra comments in italics import java applet import java util import java awt import java math import java net import java io import jellyfishclient base classes f
13. Ble Edt Wee Heb EN _Up admin Adeninistrabor 0 Oo Colonne boars with 561377 Foghorn WS IEEE deck beds are QS 7062 Irving Wi Thumbnail of higher level task SET sacks dha have bese symbol shows which ers are a naihan Seoti Ny i ro semi nee een direy logged in lest eee Soul ur Grev burrs are tain eonmplitses s udeni Na Hamer a that hano not been completed Chang boner shores task user ts working on al ejaj Leers logged In 0s IT D suderk Opnansct_I0WAblaing Axes no Done ULE betel user directories Number of active threads Aa yru mime the mous Blue Baross ime proupa of bk La measure of the burs of iver Erat prona pesa dipolar Green bise ar boton brake iae woth rur eek tasks Ehe server additional informatie Brown bios are eaan probia ix ahceen barre FIGURE 18 A visual display of student progress The progress display serves several purposes It allows you to see the progress of your whole class at a glance which will help you to set appropriate deadlines It allows you to see if any students have fallen behind It is possible to change student marks by simply clicking and dragging The progress display would not be much use if it could only show the top level tasks To see more detail about any task just click on the name of the task in the pale blue bar at the top of the progress display If you do not see the name of a task it is possible that it is obscured by the name of some other task In this ca
14. Figure 10 A simple Multiple Choice Question Authoring MCQForm 3 4 Drag and drop doughnut Java questions From the Authoring page follow the links to Drag and drop Java Micrograph Questions and then Breast Oncology 2 You should see something like this FIGURE 11 A Drag and drop doughnut question If the applet does not appear then it s possible that your computer has run out of free RAM while trying to load the large images in the problem or that Java is not enabled Figure 9 shows an example of a drag and drop doughnut applet This question type has an image and some markers which the user must place on the image Initially all the markers are along the right hand edge of the applet Try to drag one of the markers onto the image using the mouse and then click the Done button A small tick or cross will appear next to the marker you dragged Now try holding the mouse cursor over the marker without clicking You will see a short message explaining why your attempt was incorrect if it was This type of problem is very versatile and easy to set up more later ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 19 3 5 Insert the word questions This problem type presents a paragraph of text with some words omitted The student is asked to select words from pop up menus to fill the gaps The hypervariable regions lie in discrete loops of the folded structure When the positions of the hypervariable
15. Why Because the applet relies entirely on the RGB colour values it sees in the mask image so if there are peculiar colours in the mask image they can confuse the algorithm that tries to give feedback 10 3 The assessor txt file By now you are probably familiar with UDB files that have no file extension For historical reasons because of errors I made early on the assessor txt file really is a UDB but it is stored with the txt suffix Sorry Anyway here is the assessor txt file for the Statics example This is a UDB file to assess a micrograph We start by defining the labels we want the student to position Labels Tension Compression Define colours used in the masks Color 255000000 tension Color 255255000 joint Color 000170085 compression Color 000000255 right_member Color 255000255 central Now we give details about each of the Labels defined above Tension 7 Tension min 3 Tension radius 40 Tension color red Tension tension Correct Tension joint Too close to joint nPlease try again Tension compression This member will be in compression Tension right_member This member must balance the vertical ncomponent of the reaction nfrom the roller support Tension central This marker is within the truss but it should nbe placed on one of the structural elements Tension baffled This marker should be placed somewhere on the truss Compression 7 Compression min 4 Compression radius 40 Compression color gr
16. and the substituted one s subordinate The rules are as follows The default behaviour is that the subordinate file is inserted into the top level file and is subject to the same processing and escaping as the top level file HOWEVER If the subordinate file type has the no escape qualifier this is honoured even during substitution This means that using the mapping file example above js fragments can be inserted into HTML without corrupting the escape character even though the HTML top level file will be escaped as usual If this discussion has made your temples throb don t worry The standard FlyingFish installation comes with a good mapping file at the top level This top mapping file contains MIME types for a huge range of file types and sensible default settings for substitution behaviour You only need to mess with the mapping file or add extra mapping files if you need some special behaviour or you have some bizarre new file type 7 4 Permission keys It has been wisely said that obscurity is not security with respect to computer software In other words we cannot rely on the user s ignorance to protect private data or system function You must assume that your students have access to this document and have studied it as thoroughly as you have and that they know HTML and CGI conventions completely Such a user could edit the Location URL field of the browser to mimic any HTML form For example suppose that at the branc
17. any FlyingFish page to give the user information about position in the problem set You should feel free to modify the header html or footer html documents It is the best way to learn If you make a mess of it and the files no longer work properly you can always get a fresh copy from the CD It is more usual however to edit the files myHeader html and myFooter html 6 4 Conditional statements Consider the following fragment from the file task body html user Login lt 2 This is the first time you have logged in lt br gt lt i gt Hajimemashite lt i gt Which is a Japanese greeting to someone you have never met before lt br gt You have logged in user Login times lt br gt This is a conditional statement which has been broken across several lines to make it easier to read The structure is Condition Insert if condition is TRUE Insert if condition is FALSE It is also acceptable to have only Condition Insert if condition is TRUE The condition is evaluated as a boolean expression and you can use the usual range of operators and delimiters Note that the keywords true and false are NOT recognised use integers 1 and 0 instead ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 39 Comparison operators Numerical relations equality a b a b a b inequalities a lt b a lt b a gt b a gt b String relations equality string1 string2 inequality string1 str
18. do this you use the climb up operator e g J directory1 file html climbs up two directory levels from the current location and then goes down into the directory called directory1 If there is a file called file html it is returned 4 2 Special directories The FlyingFish installation on your hard disk consists of a directory with a number of sub directories and many files Some of the directories below the FlyingFish directory are special because they are named in the FlyingFish htdocs jellyfish ini file so the FlyingFish knows about them and they contain specific kinds of files and sub directories See Figure 11 ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 23 Eg FlyingFish H E 1999 Root of the year tree a Sy htdocs Web root Root of the task tree Egg task Eg admin H E Authoring H E Dynamics _100 Courses top level tasks be Pathology 330 HAE EJ Statics 100 G E user H E 9961377 H 8877852 Sr admin Users staff and students Eg nathan Root of the user tree FIGURE 14 Special directories in the FlyingFish tutorial environment The word tree is used to describe the directories because they have a tree like structure A directory contains sub directories and files and the sub directories can contain sub sub directories and so on like the branches of a tree that divide repeatedly until they end in leaves This tree like property of the file system is heavily exp
19. document into the text of another The syntax works like this If you just want the text of the document in RAW FORM i e not processed modifiers path name If you want the inserted file to be processed before insertion modifiers path name The curly braces are not always necessary but it does not hurt to get into the habit of using them They make it very clear where the path name starts and ends As an example of the usefulness of inserting a file consider the following body html document lt H2 gt t branch lt H2 gt lt p gt lt strong gt Note that the radius of the path was not given on the printed sheet Many apologies for this omission lt strong gt lt p gt lt CENTER gt applet t codebase html code Kinetics7100 class width 500 height 180 gt t appletvital html lt applet gt lt CENTER gt lt P gt lt font color red gt This is an assessed question worth a total of t gene marks marks lt font gt lt P gt t forumAnchor htm lt BR gt This document is for MS451 Kinetics AQ_2 It is an assessed problem of the Java applet type The details of this type are given in a later section For now consider the line applet t codebase html code Kinetics7100 class width 500 height 180 gt The tag t codebase html inserts a file from the task root called codebase html which contains the full path name to the Java code base on the server computer If for s
20. is Fora not Forums but we are Engineers so we will accept either We have found that the keys to running a succesful Forum are They must be about very narrow topics It is no good having a small number of general purpose Fora students are forever short of time and they want well targeted help Staff must monitor Forum contents and respond quickly otherwise the Fora will fall into disuse and may even be abused by some students 9 1 Adding a message to a Forum The Forum is all wired up and ready to go in the standard FlyingFish release This is because Fora are created as they are needed so you don t have to create anything up front Log in as a Developer and go to any page Look in the top right corner of the header for a link Forum Click on the link You should see something like this 20 The first version of the Forum was inspired by commercial software called Pacer Forum available for Macintosh only in 1994 ADVANCE epucation FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 72 FIGURE 22 An example Forum If no one has used the Forum for that Branch then you will see only a message inviting you to add something However if other users have already contributed messages you will see a list of these with names times and dates followed by a place to add a fresh one Try typing something and then press the Submit button You should see your new message at the end of all the previous ones Now use th
21. is a deliberate design decision to reduce the chance of filling up available physical RAM while the system is in use At the moment there is no way to see the progress display unless you sit in front of the server computer Future system releases will include a range of other monitoring tools including a Java version that runs on a web page and can be seen from any remote browser ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 35 6 The FlyingFish processor In Chapter 3 you surfed around a FlyingFish site and saw some of the possible problem types In this chapter I ll explain the various functions of the FlyingFish document processor that generated the pages you saw Consider the following body html document task body html font size 10 gt Welcome status User Name lt font gt lt p gt user Login lt 2 This is the first time you have logged in lt br gt lt i gt Hajimemashite lt i gt Which is a Japanese greeting to someone you have never met before lt br gt You have logged in user Login times lt br gt user Login Prev Time Your last login was user Login Prev Date from user Login Prev Host lt br gt lt BR gt status User Auth Student Your current Authority level is lt strong gt u status User Auth lt strong gt lt BR gt lt HR gt lt P gt Click on the name of your course lt P gt lt UL lt LI gt lt A HREF MS451 gt Mechanical Systems 451 l
22. jellyfish ini file will be explained in a separate section below 6 2 tree The tree subkeys define the mapping between the internal trees used by FlyingFish and the computer file system The minimal set is tree u path tree t path However it is common but optional to also define the year tree tree y path It is also possible to define any number of additional trees e g ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 59 tree x path And these trees can be used to store files or variables To refer to a variable in the x tree from HTML you would use a substitution expression like this x path1 path2 filename var1 var2 FlyingFish makes no great distinction between the usual trees u t and y and custom trees such as x All are managed by the same internal mechanisms e g UDB object trees and file caches However it would be unusual to need a custom tree like x Each tree key has a value which defines where the root of the tree is Two conventions are accepted Absolute file system references e g tree t d FlyingFish task Relative references e g tree t task The advantage of the relative form is that provided you keep the same set of directories in your FlyingFish installation the references will always be correct even if you move the entire FlyingFish directory to another hard disk Relative references make it possible to put FlyingFish on a CD ROM it will still work
23. meaningful xyz no_escape 1 The escape character will be ignored in files of this type and will appear in the final HTML output This is essential to the proper functioning of JavaScript fragments because the escape character is used as in Java itself and must not be interpereted or removed default_file index html Each directory in your task tree can define its own default file name P Top level file only see below Note that sub keys of a file type such as xyz header footer are NOT found using the obvious search pattern t mapping xyz header_footer instead they are found by first finding t mapping xyz then the subkey is expected to be immediately below the found UDB This approach is necessary so that it is possible to turn on the sub key options such as header_footer and also to turn them OFF at a lower level DEFAULT_FILE The mapping file line default_file something html deserves more attention Recall that in a previous chapter the idea of a default file was explored Specifically it was explained that a URL of this form http dynamics mech uwa edu au jellyfish baking 230 is interpereted to mean return the default file in the directory baking 230 The default file name for FlyingFish is usually body html However the mapping file key default file name establishes a new default file name convention which applies at the branch of the mapping file and in all su
24. the final HTML that the user sees This can be a useful behaviour if you need to substitute some JavaScript into a page See the section on the mapping file below It is a good practice to always escape the symbol because it is always interpereted as a variable or file reference It is not so clear whether the symbol should always be escaped The preprocessor actually ignores the and symbols if they appear in the Jellyfish source HTML outside a preprocessor bracket pair The problem is that you might write some HTML that contains the character and then later on add some conditional statements that effectively place the HTML into square brackets Any un escaped character can suddenly take on unwanted significance and will tend to make your IF THEN ELSE statement behave unexpectedly So it is best to escape them all and avoid trouble 6 8 Date strings Date information can be stored in the form of a string e g 10 Earlier versions of the server defined some additional special characters Character Meaning Example Shorthand notation for input UDB answer is shorthand notation for in user tree at this level u input answer Shorthand notation for state UDB done is shorthand notation for in user tree at this level u state done These definitions were made for a specific course and proved unworkable in some other courses so they are no longer supported HTML containing escapes for these e g
25. to go on with If the last node matching PQ has been completed FlyingFish will then suggest that the student should next attempt the first node matching AQ 7 1 3 SOLUTION NODES A common problem is limiting and then granting access to the solution to a given question It is a problem because students are not ideal mature adults but suffer from social learning difficulties that make them do strange things For example they have been known to use the solution to a problem to get through without necessarily understanding how or why the solution works In setting assessed work we are continually confronted with students who pass around the solution to the work and gain credit unfairly Over the years we have developed some strategies to discourage these inappropriate working habits and encourage productive ones Some strategies that have been found useful are To prevent a student from seeing the solution to a problem until he or she has had a reasonable attempt at it and still needs help To hide the solution to all assessed problems until the deadline has passed whether the student completes the problem or not This is to prevent traffic in printed solutions To have staggered deadlines so that students can get easy access to computing resources and thus are not forced into opportunistic work modes To show all solutions to all problems whether the problems are completed or not once the deadline has p
26. what this thing does In this chapter it is assumed that you have done the basic installation of chapter 2 without necessarily installing any additional course material You should start the FlyingFish server and then log in as described above 3 1 Variables If you logged in as admin you ll notice that on the front page there is a large welcome message for someone called Administrator Later on we will create additional user records and you will have your own private identity and name The point here is that the FlyingFish server has returned a page which is customised for the person who has logged in It can do this because it has records about each user The way in which the records are inserted into the Web page you see is very simple and elegant and it will be explained in a later section If this is the first time you have logged in you will see a message saying so This message will not appear the second or subsequent times you log in The message is actually enclosed in a conditional statement that is testing the value of a user variable The syntax for this is explained later Remember this is a quick tour to get you started details later 3 2 Java applet questions If you follow the link from the front page to Authoring questions for the ElyingFish Environment and then Question applets you should arrive at a page with a Java applet on it You should see the message Starting Java at the bottom of your browser window an
27. work If you are willing to get your hands dirty you can easily adapt existing problem sets by removing problems or changing the order This will allow you to create custom sets that more closely match your needs In order to do this you have to be comfortable using the file system on your chosen computer platform Expect to spend an afternoon and several weekends getting everything right the first time After that you will be an expert and able to make changes with confidence If you need to augment existing problem sets by creating new problems of an existing type you will have to do some programming work Depending on the problem type this programming could be in Java Mathematica or a script language This manual provides information about the libraries and conventions involved but you will probably need to attend an Advance Education training workshop to get started Our experience has been that each new problem takes several hours to write and will usually contain bugs that are found over subsequent months as the students use it If you need a new type of problem then you will have to get help from Advance Education technical staff The FlyingFish system is extremely flexible but new problem types may require minor extensions to the core of the server You should only try to do this if you are committed to producing something completely novel you are an expert programmer and you have plenty of time and money 1 4 A
28. ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 62 FlyingFish is commercial software and therefore we need some way to enforce the payment of license fees Unfortunately this has meant that we now have a fairly aggressive license check on startup The license check works like this 1 Three strings are read from the jellyfish ini file license hostIP license software and license expires 2 The license expires value is converted to a seconds value using the standard FlyingFish date conversion 3 A license string is built up by concatenating the hostIP software and seconds values e g 130 95 52 241 FlyingFish 102365774 4 The license string is then encrypted to make a 12 character license key e g lanz a8rq 9y4b 5 If the license key matches the jellyfish ini file value license the license is considered valid and FlyingFish starts normally If however there is any mismatch or missing value FlyingFish will start but will set an internal timer that will disable operation after two hours When you first receive FlyingFish by CD or from the download site it will have a license key that was valid on one of our hosts This key will no longer be valid on your host because your computer has a different IP address from ours Therefore if you are ready to do real serving work with FlyingFish you will need to obtain a fresh license key The status of your license key and the procedure for acquiring a new one are shown if you l
29. ADVANCE EDUCATION PROVIDING ADVANCED EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY amp SYSTEMS http ae maths uwa edu au ae maths uwa edu au FLYINGFIsH v1 51 DOCUMENTATION APRIL 2000 Dr Nathan Scott D ae STARFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 2 This document is copyright No part may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of an authorised representative of Advanced Education If you need more copies of this manual send an email message to the address given above We will probably have a newer version and may be able to sell you copies cheaper than you can make them yourself We may also be able to give you instant access to a Web based version of this document which is kept up to date Visit the Advance Education website to download the latest versions of the executables for your platform and get examples help software license costs FAQs and much more The Jellyfish Tutorial Environment would not exist except for the work of Dr Kevin Judd and Prof Brian Stone The text of this manual was written by Dr Nathan Scott but the software described is really a joint effort over many years eae SS 4 FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION iii Contents 1 TE OCA U CEN OI RENTE TOU TT T m 1 1 What is FlyingFish T 1 2 Why isit called ElyingFish 2 iiseeeceter enter tecniites tiet eetutrte ttti tend rediit ed tomber raten 5 1 3 Whe
30. C offset is edit the line GMT Offset the value is in seconds Unless you know what you are doing it is probably best to leave the http port line alone for now Step 5 Now you should start your FlyingFish server as described below under Check that the FlyingFish is working 2 1 3 REMOVING FLYINGFISH The FlyingFish installation does not alter your computer s guts at all It does not change the Registry and it does not mess with your menus So it is easy to remove it just drag the entire FlyingFish directory to the Recycle bin 2 2 Check that the FlyingFish is working In the following examples it will be assumed that you installed FlyingFish onto your c drive If you put it on some other drive you will have to substitute the letter of that drive wherever you see c The FlyingFish does not start running automatically you have to tell it to start running Use a Windows Explorer to view the directory c FlyingFish htdocs Double click the file FFish151 exe If all is well you will almost immediately see a new window that looks like Figure 1 I 82 y a BG Ein Ven Hain Them is 3 problem with your licence Inr FissingFish elytchinificense key woe not walid Le i did not match the other stoped valen Fiyingfish will run for ten hours and then will be disabled g OS T d U Figure 1 Initial appearance of the FlyingFish window You will see that there is a warning about your license in bright red type Th
31. E 3 The FishMinder window Do not be alarmed by the FishMinder it is harmless and will be explained later on Essentially it is just a simple process that continually watches your FlyingFish server In the unlikely event that your FlyingFish server should crash the FishMinder can bring it back to life again Now start an instance of your preferred web browser e g Netscape Navigator v 4 5 Type the IP address of your computer into the Location field followed by a colon and the port number of your FlyingFish 8080 by default If you can t see anywhere to type the URL then you need to change the settings on your browser OVANET FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 13 EDUCATION For example you should type something like http 130 95 52 48 8080 If you don t know how to find your own IP address see Appendix 3 Press return You should see a web page like Figure 4 E s EDUCATION TUTOR r1 Aduced Eduratiosal Technology and Sybes ENVIRONMENT Welcome to Flying Fish v1 3 Wii vid L7 dane 929 All righez reserved 12 part of Hur zoe package may be digitized without permission meting fom Aia Eduzasen zaff Fight up frsat D sant to explain why the words Jeips and ESingEzsh ane wed The name Jeleish is med far a set of plstierm ndeperidert standard for Web based nionalz developed by Dr Eem Jedd amd Dr Natom Seat of The Unete of Western Australia The so waee you hae just estalled is aly compatible mit thes
32. ENT DOCUMENTATION 92 15 Appendix4 Examples of expression syntax Correct syntax xpression xpected Result Notes result TRUE TRUE FALSE FALSE PRUE D FALSE ORE RUE 0 ALSE FALSE FALSE PRUE ee oS 1 0 FALSE FALSE 0 TRUE BO IRUE TRUE amp 0 FALSE FALSE Any integer that is not 0 is treated as TRUE RUE RUE R BO RUE RUE mions RUE RUE l amp amp 0 amp amp l FALSE FALSE amp amp I I miio RUE PRUE Q amp amp 0 amp amp 1 10 FALSE FALSE twenty twenty PRUE PRUE sensitive a b 1 1121 PRUE RUE a b 121 apple banana amp amp FALSE FALSE fig fig 1 Incorrect syntax Each expression in this table has one or more syntax errors The results of these expressions are undefined and ideally there will be an error message for each one Note that if any of these errors affects a student no visible message will be generated AND the expressions will be treated as evaluating to FALSE It is up to staff to properly test all documents and eliminate this sort of thing xpression Result xplanation ord Missing operator in Does not evaluate to 0 or 1 expression word Missing operator in Arithmetic operators are not expression 1 0 supported at the moment This eature may be added to a uture version pee Sa FLYINGFISH TUTO
33. Fish server adds subdirectories and files to the user directory in parallel with the directory structure of the task tree See Figure 16 ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 27 3 back xL admn Ey Auhamng Dynamics 100 xL Connected 4 Cume nl xi Curve ribesl agi m HL Cume xy 3961377 xi Impules Momentum 3977862 3 Kinemnatics1 d admiri H Kinemalics2 EHE nathan l 3 Kinematics3 Authating Kinetics Diynamicz 100 H Homen 4 Curve x Reciina m mma E Reactinea Hc 41 o e HE Aq2 J Ag 3 cj Aq 4 4 Pa ni FIGURE 16 Student work stored using a parallel directory structure As an example suppose that we wish to check whether the user with ID nathan has completed the task at Branch Dynamics 100 Rectilinear AQ 2 If the user has completed the task the FlyingFish will have created a file at FlyingFish user nathan Dynamics 100 Rectilinear AQ 2 The file will be called Done and it will contain certain information about the user s work more about this later 4 7 The UDB file format and the extended path The FlyingFish tutorial system consists of a great many files and directories Some of the file formats are already familiar to you HTML GIF JPG java class files and so on The environment defines only one new kind of file called a Universal Database File UDB These UDB files are plain text with a small amount of a
34. IRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 47 7 1 1 INFO ACCESS The info Access key can have two sub keys info Access Condition is a boolean expression which is evaluated to determine if the user is allowed to see the body html document at the same level as this info file info Access Denial is a message the user will see if access is denied usually a brief explanation of the problem In the UDB file given above Access is granted if either u MS451 Kinematics2 Done DONE 1 meaning that the user has completed the previous problem set or if u status User Auth Developer meaning that the user has a certain authority level You may think it odd that we test the completion of the previous set using string comparisons The problem is that the Done DONE key only appears when a node has been completed and then it always has the value 1 If the key does not exist at all then it has no value neither 0 nor 1 so an integer based comparison will sometimes produce a syntax error and fail The info Access Condition values can be anything you like In this case they are being used to force the student to complete some problem sets in a certain order Each problem set except the first has a Condition which names the previous set There are cases where we wish to grant the student access to a node without necessarily satisfying the info Access condition This mechanism is used to control access to numerous resources associated with Java a
35. Processor Rete ne tiit pepe E E a escis cede eet a DERE uetus 35 6 1 Inserting a variable scsacioiian a a a a a aa E E 35 6 2 Tre climbing ref reNC S iis scscccssescessacstasessancescsustendaccobdeechoseconduastedsnisenjacdoueeconsutecuecaieusutesuncatsonitvetactedonleaatesiussacesbeetins 36 6 3 The header ard footer deus pesi cucavesevescasscntvasaisvassastasceusskbavecsaseaiousdesteveaeytiatsiensads siasoesessdasueuectertentnetpeds 6 4 Conditional statements 6 5 Inserting an entire document tteenieettetciet n aeeti eieae i reser pet EK satasia ESen S 40 6 6 Testing for the existance of a file or UDB value sse tentent 41 6 7 Escape characters 6 8 Date stngs coe ne ene meten E tende aeqne ena A tete eiiis tue 6 9 Eins eee ete bein tede EO d ee peri eene iic et e eite lend 7 Special files 7 1 Course requirements and limited ACCESS iieii i ii 46 7 2 Deadlines info Deadline and info Deadline stagger sene 49 7 2 User filter info Student 7 3 Mapping files setting MIME behavioul c sscsssssssessessseesssesseesseessessssesseesseesseessesssssesseesssesseessseeesnsesseesseesseetss 7 4 PEFIMMISSION KEYS 8 Detailed FlyingFish configuration 8 1 Ihejellyfish iini file isseencsetentettrtc tret etrtce rito btcst t inepte truc 8 2 tre nones 8 2 farm 8 3 http port 8 3 admin 25 8 4 timeout idle
36. RIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 93 value 4 Missing string Strings can t be compared omparison operator in directly to numbers expression value 4 apple banana Bad operator found in ort order operators not string expression apple lt banana ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 94 16 Appendix5 Exercises to help you get started with the Fish This document is a supplement to the FlyingFish user manual and software release on CD ROM It is intended to help you with a range of administrative and authoring tasks you might reasonably want to do You may find it helpful to work through the exercises in the order given it will help you become familiar with both the software and the user manual To use the CD ROM you will have to be able to unzip some files if your computer does not already have a zip utility then you should start by installing PKZip An installer is provided on the CD ROM 16 1 Basic server installation 1 If you already have a c FlyingFish directory rename it to c FlyingFish so that it will not interfere with later steps Unzip the FFish139 package from the CD ROM it s in the Win directory Install course material for Dynamics 100 into the directory c FlyingFish task Dynamics_100 4 Start the FFish139 server and log in as described on page 6 of the user manual Create a user identity for yourself page 25 section 5 3 Log in using your new ide
37. TION 24 4 4 The task tree and the current Branch Consider the task get a degree This top level task is achieved by working on a number of sub tasks the semesters of the degree program Each semester there are usually a number of courses to be done subtasks of the semester and each course usually has a number of assignments and exams sub sub tasks This tree like structure goes down to a very fine level of detail the finest grain of tasks could be sub parts of a single tutorial problem In designing the FlyingFish system we have tried to use straightforward conventions So it was natural to exploit the tree structure of the file system directory tree to express the tree structure of the tasks and sub tasks The task tree root can be seen as the highest task known to the system the sub directories of the task directory are sub tasks and so on A task can be anything from a whole degree program to a single tutorial question the system treats the tasks in exactly the same way Because the tasks form a tree it is possible to specify a unique path to a particular task just as you might specify a path to a web resource in a URL The path to a given task is of course relative to the root of all tasks the task tree So let us suppose you want to look at the web page for a task called Authoring JavaQuestionsI You might initially think that the URL would look like this http 130 95 52 48 8080 Authoring JavaQuestionsI
38. Web site Figure 11a the file dynamics default html could contain the following HTML fragment a hrefz DynEqnSheet Standard Equation Sheet lt a gt If the user clicks on this Anchor the browser understands that the document root level dynamics DynEqnSheet is desired Of course the Web server knows that the document ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 22 root level dynamics DynEqnSheet default html is to be returned The file reference DynEqnSheet is very simple and has a useful property if the directory dynamics with all its contents is moved to some other part of the directory tree the relative reference DynEqnSheet in the document dynamics default html remains valid It is as though the directory is pointing to something inside itself The process of surfing a given web site that is looking around at the various files in the site can thus be seen as either adding new elements to a path to go deeper into the directory tree or removing them to climb out of a directory Note that the convention is that a relative reference has no leading character An absolute reference however begins with a This convention will make more sense when we come to discuss the insertion of variables in the FlyingFish Environment Also note that it is possible to make relative references that refer to directories or files at a higher level in the directory structure To
39. a acia rac P NA EEEE ASS 3 8 On lineediting To delli P 4 Understanding the file structures 4 1 Essential background default files and relative references sse 21 4 2 SpPelall CIPO CtO ies MM E 4 3 The web root and basic web server function 4 4 The task tree and the current Branch eese tette ttt tette tette tette tette tette tete 4 5 The year tree and parallel directory structures seen tentent nnns 25 4 6 The user tree 4 7 The UDB file format and the extended path ttnentenenitnnnnn 27 4 8 File caching vs file editing sra iaeia SEa EEEE E EEan ia 28 4 9 Parallel directory structures are not foolproof seen 29 5 Creating and managing user TECOLAS ccseccaserssvaceesesstusnseasassasuctoseenstecsieesbusestusscevessessuteusstsusnscadnesttsniatessnossnsbisnesubectionecetesseds 30 5 1 Impersonating another USER scceesscceissccscsersaisescaiiecosassecdseensigcstsuitseaseectsvnectadnecoadiensusiedSasattelicadsonetassacesdeactuntesiuisecoabecioes 30 5 2 Creating a single user record the hard way sse eene nennen 31 5 3 Creating a mew user the easy Way cerent ttt it aeii k aiara aiaa GANE Sia Es EEE aE REEE 31 5 4 Creating many student records at once tenente tenente tenntenentenentnnenennnnennn 32 5 The FlyingFish progress display monitor seen tenete ennt tennnnnnnnns 33 6 Th Flying Fish
40. ally every few days you might choose to provide a single directory function tag instead of the three anchors t directory This would produce a list of the subdirectories for the student complete with anchors to allow navigation The only drawback is that the names of the directories will be in alphabetical order rather than the info Complete order that you would probably prefer The directory function is thus of only limited use for display to students It might be helpful if you want to provide an alphabetical index or glossary at some point in your course material 18 This is an example where some serious innovation will be needed if the computer system is to mark the students work ADVANCE Fpucation FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 69 9 3 Class list Log in as a Developer then click the small link Class list at the bottom of the front page You should see something like Figure 21 FIGURE 21 A typical class list The list may not show all the users known to the FlyingFish i e all the users in the user tree The contents of the list are governed by The contents of the info Student filter at this level or the first filter found while searching upward Your user preferences for Offset and Count The offset and count values govern how many students will be shown at once This feature is necessary because it can take a long time to display a list of several hundred students Each
41. and limited access In a sense the FlyingFish Tutorial Environment serves just three purposes 1 To keep records of user activity 2 To pose a series of problems for the user to solve and 3 To prevent the user from gaining unauthorised access to some resources Ironically good teaching seems to involve making some information patently obvious while at the same time hiding some information until an appropriate moment For example we want the equation sheet for a course to be available at all times to the students but we want to hide the solution to an assessed problem until after a certain date In this section we will explore points 2 and 3 How do we specify which problems the user MUST complete How do we limit access to some resources and then grant access at an approriate moment Each node in the Task tree can have a UDB file called simply info This file can contain certain key value pairs that tell FlyingFish how to view the node Remember that a node is either a single problem or a group of problems such as an entire course Here is the info file from MS451 Kinetics Access Condition u MS451 Kinematics2 Done DONE 1 u status User Auth Developer Access Denial You have not yet finished all the problems in the previous set Complete PQ AQ Deadline Wed 19 Aug 1998 5 00PM The meaning and effect of the Access Complete and Deadline entries is explained below poe Sn FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENV
42. ask FlyingFish task me1112 kinetics year FlyingFish 1999 FlyingFish 1999 me1112 kinetics user FlyingFish user FlyingFish user user ID me1112 Kinetics The use of the user ID in the last case will be explained below The important new idea here is that there are parallel directory structures in the system The Branch is more than just a unique identifier for the current task it can also be used as a sort of key when getting information about other things such as the progress of a user with respect to the task in question All the information that can be accessed using a particular Branch string is related even though it is scattered widely in the computer file system AII the information available at a particular Branch can be seen as belonging to a virtual directory which we call a node Just to make things interesting in this manual the word node is also sometimes substituted for directory The word node is drawn from computer science nomenclature for one element of an abstract tree structure 4 6 The user tree Each user of the system appears as a subdirectory of the user root refer to Figure 11 above To add a user one must create a fresh user directory and put certain files in it containing the name and other details about the user a process that is explained in a later section The user directory also stores all information about the work a user has done As a user completes tasks the Flying
43. assed This is to help students who have fallen behind Usually there is no credit available anyway Solution nodes are protected by the same info Access Condition mechanism as all other nodes and there is nothing special about them However it is often the case that we want a great many problems to follow the same rules for hiding or showing the solution One way to do this is to have a single UDB file somewhere high in the task tree called e g solution access p Condition G t deadline time lt t time l u user Authority AuthInt gt 10 p Denial The solution to this practice question will become available t deadline a Condition G y info deadline time lt t time u user Authority AuthInt gt 10 a Denial The solution to this assessed question will become available y info deadline date error Condition u user Authority AuthInt gt 10 error Denial This error message is only made available when you make a specific error Then to protect the solution to a practice question the info file looks like this Access Condition t solution_access p Condition ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 49 Access Denial t solution_access p Denial And to protect an assessed question it is Access Condition t solution_access a Condition Access Denial t solution_access a Denial Note that the tree climbing syntax is used
44. ave no internet connection or a very poor one e g a modem line only But for high volume serving you have to have a fast stable TCP IP connection Your server s IP number is a unique 4 digit number e g 130 95 52 4 which identifies your computer and can be used in the Location field of a web browser So it is also very important that a high volume server has a stable IP address Students would become very frustrated if they could log in using a certain address one day but not the next If you are in doubt about the type of TCP IP connection you have or whether your IP address is stable contact your network administrator 2 1 2 GETTING READY TO INSTALL FLYINGFISH The FlyingFish CD ROM has compressed files on it and you will need a zip utility to decompress them A public domain zip utility called PKZip is included on the CD ROM If you do not have a zip utility already you should open the PKZip directory and follow the installation instructions for PKZip By default the Windows Explorer hides GIES HE file extensions i e a file called thing ini will w Fenes appear on the screen as simply thing Hidden fles Actually depending on the settings thing ini Besse it might not appear at all I find this annoying so I usually set the Explorer View Options so that all files are shown and all file extensions are shown To do this select View Options from the Explorer menu Set rus eas gene ne mets your options to look lik
45. awing odd symbols like degrees This code is clunky but it works A table of available characters can be seen at http www mech uwa edu au HowTo JavaChars html Character degreeSym new Character char 176 g drawString nns angle degreeSym toString 90 50 end paint method end class definition 9 5 Writing a new problem 1 Duplicate the file Rect1010 java under the operating system Give the new file a name that describes the problem e g Thermo21 java 2 Import the new file into your project You can leave the old file s in the project if you wish they will not interfere with the new one I have a project for one course with more than 200 applets in it 3 Rename the existing problem gif to e g Rect1010 gif so that it will not be replaced when you create new artwork for Thermo21 4 Open the new file and change the name of the public class to match the file name Thermo21 in this case 5 Open the file Standalone html and change the name of the class that appears in the applet tag code Thermo21 class 6 Create artwork for the problem in a paint package and save it as problem gif Put this new GIF file in the codebase directory 7 Edit the Thermo21 java file so that it calculates the answers you want and displays them on the screen Compile the Thermo21 class file You may have to adjust the applet size shown in the HTML file i e you may have to edit the height and width values If s
46. bdirectories unless they contain another mapping file which establishes its own convention This was set up to assist content authors who already have large web sites that use a different default file name convention e g index html Such a site can be brought into the FlyingFish task tree without modification all you have to do is put an appropriate mapping file in the top level directory ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 55 MIME TYPE PROCESSING OPTIONS AND EMBEDDING BY SUBSTITUTION It will be seen that the mapping file allows precise control over MIME typing of data and also over some processing options on a level by level or directory by directory basis However there is one final subtlety that we must address When a file is requested by a brower there is no doubt about the MIME type of the returned file If a text file is requested the MIME type of the returned data is set to text plain or whatever the mapping file dictates But what if an HTML file is requested and the requested file subtitutes a text file within it In other words what happens if the following body html file is requested lt P gt This is HTML lt P gt t my_text_file txt lt P gt More HTML lt P gt We must make a distinction between the body html file the originally requested file and the file which is slurped in during the substitution process We will call the originally requested file the top level file
47. bypassed In other words if you edit some HTML or UDB file the changes will be respected and will immediately be available to all users If you edit files from the Windows Explorer there is no such guarantee Warning watch out for the lt TEXTAREA gt tag The crude on line editor is actually an HTML form and you can see it if you examine the contents of the file task root edit wrapper html FlyingFish puts the raw text of the edited page into the lt TEXTAREA TEXTAREA tag pair in the form like this FORM METHOD POST gt ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 67 lt INPUT NAME Cmd TYPE hidden VALUE EDIT gt lt TEXTAREA NAME HTML WRAPZTRUE ROWS 18 COLS 80 gt this lt TEXTAREA gt lt FORM gt this is a special HTML tag which means the raw text of the file at the current Branch and using the current Pattern Unfortunately the browsers are currently not smart enough to deal with a tag combination like this lt TEXTAREA gt Blah blah blah lt TEXTAREA gt Some text in my private textarea lt TEXTAREA gt the browser will think that the edit_wrapper text area has finished and this text will appear OUTSIDE the edit box lt TEXTAREA gt The text in italics is the raw text of a file that is being edited But the edited file contains a TEXTAREA pair and this confuses the browser The designers of the web browsers did not think of the possibility that someone would wa
48. can be identified by a unique Branch string Problem or Question A single activity which a student user is to interact with A problem usually appears on a single Web page Problem set A group of related problems The usual relationship is that the problems are about the same branch of knowledge and they are arranged in order of difficulty Problems in a set can be of any type and do not have to be all of the same type Problem type A class of problems that share a similar interface that is they look similar to the student The interface consists of two parts the part seen by the student and the response expected from the student An example is a problem which presents a diagram with some random parameters and requires the student to type a numerical answer All problems that provide these interface features are said to be of the same type Typically problems of the same type have some common code FlyingFish An abbreviation for FlyingFish Tutorial Environment FlyingFish A server program for Windows NT Jellyfish Tutorial Environment The collection of platform independant standards for directory trees and file formats along with one or more executables for a specific computer platform that together make the tutorial system described in this manual Task node See Node Task tree The collection of directories and files that describes all courses on a particular server Each course appears as a subdirectory of the top task nod
49. competence classes LoadError carDistB carDistA sign html You seem to have forgotten about the sign convention this is far more important than you may realise 5 1 0 0 LoadError 85 0 yourNumbers html Remember you have your own numbers for every problem 3 2 0 0 Here we load some erroneous answers We try to pick things that students will probably get wrong based on past examination papers The 85 0 answer was the answer to a problem on a printed sheet that was given to the students public void paint Graphics g paint is a method defined by the Java class Applet We override it to draw something that is specific to this problem super means the super class of this class i e Standalone That class has a paint method which does nothing but draw a picture called problem gif if it can be found f your problem does not need a background picture just comment out the next line super paint g if Idone loading seed return numbers have not arrived yet nns is a utility defined in Standalone class It formats a double as a String in a sensible way i e it will never produce something awful like 4 200000000000001 g drawString nns carDistA m 45 115 g drawString nns carDistB m 220 122 When you first write a problem give any old values for the positions e g 45 115 Then compile it and run it When you click on the applet the coordinates
50. d eventually you should see something like this on the screen Rectilinear Problem 1 Two marks on a road are a known distance apart If a car moves from B to A determine its change in position Deltas Positive direction HL LI Ig 115 Fm e JCsm JL tone Figure 9 A typical numerical answer applet Authoring JavaQuestionsI Follow the instructions on the page and see how the applet responds If you can finish the problem by getting it right and then follow the link Go to next problem at the top of the page 3 8 Multiple choice question MCQ It is my view that multiple choice questions are boring for students and have serious educational shortcomings However it seems that as far as many ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 18 teachers are concerned they are the height of computer based training So for completeness we have included an example Follow the link from the Authoring page to Form based Multiple Choice Questions If you break a piece of mild steel the broken surface looks grainy This is because The metal crystallized when it broke The metal was always crystalline but now we can see some of the grain boundaries Correct We can see the boundaries because the crack propagates preferentially along the amorphous regions between the crystals grains The metal is amorphous and it just looks grainy Q This would never happen the broken surfaces would look smooth
51. dditional structure In other words you can read them and edit them with a simple text editor like the Notepad Here is an example UDB file from the path FlyingFish user nathan user Authority Developer Course 2A1 1 Course M155 1 Course SM155 1 Name Nathan Scott Name Family Scott Name Given Nathan Name Initials N Name Preferred Nathan Password mudflap UserlD nathan Note that ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 28 The file consists of key value pairs e g Authority Developer If a key contains the character a sub key is defined and these key subkey combinations describe a tree structure Line breaks are significant and each key value pair appears on a single line The UDB file format has some nice properties It is very flexible you can add additional key value lines without affecting the meaning of the existing lines In other words the order of key value pairs in the file is not significant Line breaks can be CR LF or CRLF pairs It is plain text so it is completely cross platform It is simple and human readable which is a great advantage if you have to make manual changes There is nothing secret or proprietary about the file format so it is not likely to go out of date There is one additional property of the UDB file format that may not be immediately obvious Suppose that we want to access the Family Name of this user We can do this with an extended URL which not only identifie
52. dinator or else they are being misled by the error which is worse FlyingFish provides a crude on line editor for HTML so that users of sufficient authority can make instant changes The standard FlyingFish release is set up to allow this on every page Log in as a high level user e g a Developer and look at the bottom of the page for a small link edit this file Click on the link You should see something like this Staff only edit source of Authoring test area not ready html Submit Reset lt H3 gt Sorry this problem set is not ready yet lt H3 gt lt P gt I m working on it as fast as I can but you are still ahead of me lt P gt lt P gt Try again during your next tutorial class lt P gt FIGURE 20 The on line HTML editor Edit the text and then press the Submit button You should see your changes immediately It is possible to edit any text based file you can see e g UDB file contents HTML files text files The editor is invoked using the query string CmdzSOURCE amp Pattern t and you will see that the edit this file link is nothing more than the line shown above i e it adds this edit query string to whatever the current Branch is By altering the Pattern you can edit files in the user year or task tree If no pattern is given the default is t i e edit file at this Branch in the task tree One of the great advantages of the on line editor is that the internal caches for files are
53. e Student Helper Controller Designer or Developer Don t use any other strings they won t be recognised It s probably a good idea to use only Student and Developer for now 2 There are any number of Course keys which tell the system which courses the student is supposed to be doing The Course keys can be anything you like but it is a good idea to make them match the names of the tasks in the task tree 3 The Name and Password keys are fairly self explanatory There must be a UserID key and it must be the same as the name of the directory that the user UDB is in This is an annoying restriction which will be removed in a future version of this system For now just make sure it is true 5 8 Creating a new user the easy way A user of sufficient authority is allowed to create new user records The process is very easy Recall that it is possible to impersonate another user using an extension of the URL syntax e g http 130 95 52 240 8080 jellyfish rasputin Dynamics 100 Kinetics But what will the server do if you try to impersonate a user that does not exist If you have sufficient authority and if your preferences are set correctly the 9 Don t forget always quit the FlyingFish before working with the files manually ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 32 FlyingFish will create a new user record Try the following steps to make yourself a user account 1 Log in as admin a
54. e Up or Front Page link to go to a different Branch For example you might navigate downward into a course Click the Forum link at this new Branch You will see a different Forum from the one you saw before That is because this is the now the Forum for the new Branch and it is maintained separately from the Fora for all other branches There is one Forum at each and every Branch in your course material The association of Branches with Fora should give you a hint about how they can be used As we go downward into a course the Branch gets longer and the course material gets more specific A top level course such as Dancing might have a sub directory read subtask called Ballroom Dancing which in turn might have a subtask Tango and so on Messages about the Tango should go in the Forum at the Dancing Ballroom Dancing Tango branch Messages about Dancing in general should go in the top level Dancing Forum We have found that students need a little guidance about this at the start of a course but they quickly catch on Sometimes you might want to have several Fora at a single Branch just as you might have several HTML documents in a single level of the task tree This is no problem at all every HTML document in the task tree effectively has a Forum associated with it and these are separate from the Fora for the body html documents ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 73 9 3 Anonymity and carelessness If yo
55. e each course usually has several subdirectories representing topics and each topic usually has several subdirectories representing problems The tree structure can be as deep as is needed provided it does not exceed the specifications of your computer s file system Top task The highest level task node This node corresponds to the task directory which on some systems is nominated in an initialisation file such as FlyingFish ini UDB Universal Data Base a file format developed by Dr Kevin Judd It is text only and usually human readable It is a list of key value pairs separated by return or newline characters The keys can contain heirarchical divisions for example aa bb cc value The UDB file exists at a particular Node i e in a particular directory so it is possible to refer to any value in the file using an extended path e g topNode sub1 sub2 udbFile aa bb cc Identifies the value with key aa bb cc in the file udbFile which is in the subdirectory sub2 ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 90 12 Appendix1 Staying in touch 12 1 email addresses Please keep us informed about what you are doing We are always delighted to hear from people who are using our software and we always answer email Dr Nathan Scott nscott mech uwa edu au Dr Kevin Judd kevin maths uwa edu au Prof Brian Stone bjs mech uwa edu au 12 2 Web addresses Advance Education http ae maths uwa edu au FlyingFish http www
56. e hat mdian Adivefarialos A FEITT Foghom Hz 12 52 Iring WI nahan Soot HW w If you click on the ID of a user you will immediately start impersonating him or her To stop impersonation edit the Location field to remove the user path element The impersonation mechanism is very useful for editing student details such as name and password for awarding marks to students for correcting marks and even for creating new user records as we will see in later sections ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 31 5 2 Creating a single user record the hard way This really is the hard way and an easy way is explained below This section is only here to show you what a minimal user record contains Each FlyingFish user has a single directory in the FlyingFish root user directory on the hard disk So one way to create new user records is to duplicate an existing user directory and then to modify the contents of the directory The important persistent information about a user called XXX is stored in the UDB file FlyingFish root user XXX user Here s an example of a minimal user UDB Authority Developer Course 2A1 1 Course M155 1 Course SM155 1 Name Nathan Scott Name Family Scott Name Given Nathan Name Initials N Name Preferred Nathan Password mudflap UserlD nathan The important features of the file are 1 It contains a key for the Authority of the user Currently supported values ar
57. e for it ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 58 8 Detailed FlyingFish configuration The FlyingFish package is designed for use by ordinary university teachers and the release version contains configuration files to allow almost anyone to quickly have something running In Chapter 2 Installation the sequence of steps for installation is almost nothing more than decompress run In fact FlyingFish will even run off a CD ROM where no configuration is possible at all although no user data can be saved either This section is only for people who want to set up something unusual and therefore must change the jellyfish ini file 8 1 The jellyfish ini file Here is an example of a jellyfish ini file tree u user tree t task tree y 2000 farm address 130 95 16 27 farm port 5555 http port 8070 admin email nscott mech uwa edu au admin name Dr Nathan Scott timeout idle 1800 GMT Offset 28800 persistent mozilla 1 persistent msie 1 license 1anz a8rq 9y4b license expires 31 Dec 2001 11 59PM license hostIP 130 95 52 241 license software FlyingFish It is a UDB file and is unusual only because unlike other UDB files it has the file type ini instead of the usual empty file type FlyingFish looks for the jellyfish ini file in the same directory as the FFishXXX exe executable If it is missing FlyingFish will not start at all and there will not even be an error message Each part of the
58. e obvious way to show a deadline value on a page is to insert it as a variable in the usual way Q u y t info Deadline However this is not ideal because we would see the literal value of the info Deadline key which might be incomplete or even inconsistent It is better to use the deadline function Q t deadline Note that this is not a UDB value it is a function call The FlyingFish creates a deadline string which is corrected for the student s current time zone and may also be staggered if you have set a stagger value Sometimes it is helpful to show students deadlines for other parts of the tree It is easy to do this just use a path before the deadline function like this t deadline o r t Curvilinear_XY deadline Example testing whether a date has passed It is useful to customise HTML pages based on the time they are seen For example you might want to hide certain information such as the results of a test until a certain date has passed It is easy to do this using a combination of the conditional statment and function notation The trick is to convert the human readable date strings into integers before doing the comparison t deadline returns a string like 6 00PM Fri 24 Sep 1999 t deadline ticks ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 51 returns a string like 93320733 which is the number of seconds since 1 Jan 1970 t ticks by itsel
59. e reflects the structure of the task tree If messages have been posted there are times and dates a user name link and a synopsis of the message If you click on the user name link you will see the admin area for the user who posted the message i e the page showing the names of the user If you click on the synopsis of the message you will go immediately to the message where it was originally posted If you click the Clear button then the list will be emptied but this only affects your change list not the change lists for other users Forum change notifications are stored in a UDB file in each user s directory e g user root nathan forum_changes this UDB grows as messages are posted and when you press the Clear button it is erased We want Student level users to be able to clear the list so we specifically provide change permission for this file see task root forum_changes 9 3 Editing Fora If you need to edit a Forum click the Edit this file link as usual You will see a series of messages in the following format A NAME 951919921 gt lt A gt H4 Q t publicID 9961377 t date 951919921 lt H4 gt lt HR gt If you want to delete a message entirely delete everything from A NAME to lt HR gt a complete repeating unit The line lt A NAME is the anchor used to scroll the Forum to the message It is not critically important but you should leave it alone if you want the forum_change ancho
60. e standards BUT for charty it has different name In this case is called FiyingEish becaeee ois smaller and aeter than te predecessore Eventually there wil be compatible server packages for Macstosh and TEIE EJ FIGURE 4 Main index html page The main index html page is the file c FlyingFish htdocs index html Scroll down the page and follow the link to the Login page Figure 3 7 Here s a quick way to avoid looking at the appendix Type http localhost 8080 ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 14 O SSS Netscape Login SSS rl EJ M Back Forward Reload Home Search Guide Images Print Security Stop Z Location E http teach240 mech uwa edu au Login html Login Don t save any bookmarks to this page It will be moved quite frequently Always go to the front page for your course 1 Enter your Student ID 2 Enter your Password TUTOR TDA 3 Click this button ENVIRONMENT Powered by the Jellyfish course server Nath Shot nce Usos edu au FIGURE5 The login page Type user ID admin but leave the password blank Press the Login button If all is well you will immediately see something like this Netscape Administrator Back Forward Reload Home Search Guide Images Print Security Stop i i 2 M Location A http teach240 mech uwa edu au cgi win JelTly fishPC
61. e the example on the F Hbi HE te seismsiorsi torte pees s rm regies right gt FF Inchadedetcipion Des lor ig sed len panes qa rk i deseane dike XJ Virkual darica mean DEM Meie dial g x ee 2 1 2 INSTALLING FLYINGFISH Step 1 Insert the FlyingFish CD Open the directory win and find the latest version of the FlyingFish package This will be the file called 3 I have observed that some universities use dynamic IP address allocation e g DHCP Thankfully these dynamic allocation schemes are not always truly dynamic i e it is likely that your computer is always given the same address Appendix 3 explains some techniques for determining your server s address ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 10 FFishXXX zip where XXX is the highest integer you can see At the time of writing the latest version was FFish151 zip Step 2 Double click the FFishXXX zip file and extract to your C drive it is also OK to extract to some other drive everything will still work Step 3 When the extraction is complete you should see a single new directory called C FlyingFish Step 4 Your FlyingFish server could now run However it is worth taking a moment to edit the ini file since you will have to do this sooner or later Edit the file FlyingFish jellyfish ini using a text editor like NotePad You will see something like this tree u user tree t task tree y 2000 farm addres
62. een Compression compression Correct Compression joint Too close to joint nPlease try again Compression tension This member will be in tension eae Se FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 87 Compression right_member Correct Compression central This marker is within the truss but it should nbe placed on one of the structural elements Compression baffled This marker should be placed somewhere on the truss This UDB file is also unusual in that it has C style comments i e to start a comment I must emphasise that comments of this kind are NOT a standard UDB feature I broke the rules for assessor txt files because I felt comments were essential to help keep track of all the keys in the file The file breaks one final UDB convention because the order of lines in the file is somewhat important as we shall see The comments in the assessor txt file are almost enough to explain what it does however There is a comma delimited list of the Labels doughnut names These Labels can contain spaces if you wish There is a block of definitions of mask colour names e g Color 255000000 tension The convention is a little strange and I apologise The colour is given as a Red Green Blue triple as in HTML background colours but the three components are packed together as decimal numbers rather than hexadecimal I no longer remember why I did it this way Anyway 255000000 means red 255 green 0 blue 0 i e p
63. ell enter a preferred name e g tamlin and press the Submit button but the form would come back unchanged FlyingFish would reject the proposed variable change u user Name Preferred tamlin To allow Student level users to have control over a user variable we have to specifically grant permission to change it by creating a special permission UDB in the task tree For this example the permission key would be in a file task root user and the file would contain a key Name Preferred permission u The standard release version of FlyingFish has a task root user file containing Name Family permission u Name Given permission u Name Preferred permission u Password permission u Sex permission u Title permission u email permission u PrivateWeb permission u Because we grant the student the ability to change all of these fields To grant a user permission to alter data in the task tree the permission key is permission t It is also possible to stack up the permission flags e g permission uyt would allow Students to make changes to some UDB value in the user year or task trees It would be unusual to allow student users to change variables in the task tree mainly because the data could then be subject to rapid repeated changes If several hundred users are all getting and setting the value of some variable then its value at any instant might not be very meaningful However the facility is there if you can think of a us
64. ent computer platform the users should not even notice the difference You can think of the FlyingFish Environment in the same way that you think about the Web The Web consists of Web Servers available for all the main computer platforms which serve Web files such as HTML and GIF files The file formats are platform independent you can move your Web site to a different server or change Web server binaries and the files continue to look the same as far as the user is concerned The key to this portability is adherence to published standards and conventions As long as all the Web servers and Web browsers speak the same language it all works smoothly The Web s extraordinary growth is at least partly the result of an inherent simplicity In its original form it was meant only as a mechanism for publishing documents The file format for HTML is very simple and can be edited with an ordinary text editor by just about anyone We have tried hard to have this kind of simplicity in the FlyingFish environment This is important because just as we expect the Web and HTML to exist for a long time we hope that courses written for the FlyingFish Environment will be useful to students for a long time If we relied on proprietary file formats then one day the editors for these formats would go out of date and your effort in creating the files would be wasted because you could no longer change them to keep them current These simple platform indepe
65. er as your FlyingFish server then you do not even need to know what your IP address is Your web browser will understand that if you type http localhost 8080 o r http 127 0 0 1 8080 that you want to see the index html page on your local server However if you want to log in from any other computer you will need the IP address of the server computer Windows 95 and 98 Use the Start menu on the server select the Programs sub menu and then the MS DOS prompt command to create an MS DOS window Type the command winipcfg And press return You should see a new window like this IP Configuration c x1 r Ethemet Adapter Information DEC DC21041 PCI Ethernet Ada Adapter Address 00 50 E 4 50 7B 2D IP Address 130 95 52 241 Subnet Mask 255 255 255 0 Default Gateway 130 95 52 1 Release RENEW Release All Renew All More Info gt gt FIGURE 28 The WINIPCFG EXE display If your IP address is given as 0 0 0 0 then something is wrong with the IP configuration on your server Sometimes you can make it work by pressing the Renew All button Windows NT Use the Start menu on the server select the Programs sub menu and then the MS DOS prompt command to create an MS DOS window Type the command ipconfig all And press return No new window will appear but you should be able to read the IP number from the MS DOS console ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONM
66. erver does not simply return a copy of the body html document as an ordinary Web server might The document is processed before it is sent to the user The processing which is done is one of FlyingFish s most powerful features and is explained in a later chapter Relative references are possible indeed highly advisable in the task tree as well as in the ordinary web tree If the document FlyingFish task me1112 kinetics body html contains an anchor A HREF down gt Go down lt A gt Then clicking on the anchor will point the browser at FlyingFish task me1112 kinetics down body html note that the trailing character in the relative reference down really is significant If we were to leave the off and make the anchor A HREF down Go down lt A gt then clicking on the anchor would point the browser at an address FlyingFish task me1112 kinetics down All would seem well enough because the FlyingFish would return the correct body html document however things could go seriously wrong after this point The problem is that the browser literally tacks on additional Branch elements as you go down into the task tree and it literally strips them as you go up It is not smart enough to know which branch elements are files and which are directories So if you tried to go down again by extending the branch with below you would effectively be pointing the browser at FlyingFish task me1112 K
67. esscecsssssssssscsscasscsessssssesscasseseensacsesssasseseeasacseeeaesess 16 2 Editing web pages and creating new ones sssssssssssssseessssessssesesssesessseesssssessnesssssecsssseesssseessseessseeessneessseesssnessn 16 3 Create anew drag and drop Java problem 16 4 Create a new single numerical answer Java problem sse enne 16 5 Create a completely new type of Java problem sssssseeeeeeeeneetentenn entente nennen ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 5 1 Introduction 1 1 What is FlyingFish Essentially it is a tutorial environment or system It allows staff to set a sequence of problems which can take a wide range of forms and also deadlines and marking strategies It also allows students to log in using a Web browser in order to solve the problems At any time staff can see how students have progressed and marks can be awarded There are many software packages available today that provide these services So why should you use FlyingFish Because it is more powerful and flexible than any current competitor Because it is available on all the main computer platforms Because the file structure and format used by the system are clear logical and will not go out of date Because it was developed over many years by University teachers who happen to also be programmers rather than by programmers trying to follow the ideas of teachers Because the system and those who u
68. et that has the student draw a vector on the screen See Figure ADVANCE epucation FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 83 10 Application example the Java drag and drop question type This chapter draws heavily on the work of Dr Moira Maley of the UWA Faculty of Medicine In 1998 she started to use the FlyingFish to develop course material in the field of Microbiology To satisfy the perceived educational needs of part of the course Dr Scott and Dr Maley developed a new Java problem type applet for the system which has proven to be both effective and adaptable The best way to get acquainted with the drag and drop applet is probably to try it live at Authoring Micrographs Breast2 You will see something like this pystrophic Geiticationhic calcification r ME C Tubules Olnfiltrating carcinoma FIGURE 23 The CJavaMicrograph applet again This chapter explains how to create a new problem that has the drag and drop interface Before I launch into the explanation I have some good news and some bad news The good news is that you will not need to know any Java to create new problems of this type you can simply re use the existing applet The bad news is that Dr Maley and I worked on this for several months and we are very proud of the Java programming that went into making it all work This means that I will not give you the source code for CJavaMicrograph so you won t be able to make changes to it
69. f returns the CURRENT ticks i e the ticks at the time the HTML document was generated So you can test whether the deadline has passed using a conditional statement of this kind t ticks lt t deadline ticks Before deadline After deadline 7 2 User filter info Student A typical FlyingFish installation serves many courses from a single FlyingFish instance As a result there are users who belong to unrelated class groups in the system Yet when we want to see the progress of the class we only wish to see the progress of students who are assigned to that class FlyingFish provides a very simple but effective solution to this problem At any level of the task tree there can be a UDB key info Student Conditional statement The conditional statement should be a fragment of HTML that when preprocessed in the context of a given user will evaluate to either 1 or 0 For example info Student u user Course 600101 Each user object has a chance to evaluate the conditional statement and if it turns into something other than 0 the user is in the list for the course In this case we are testing the value of a key in the main user file u user but you could test other keys or even use boolean operators like amp amp and It makes sense to have an info Student filter in each of your courses and to have a logical system for the keys that you test I have found it helpful to have the convention of o
70. h Baking 230 there is an HTML form FORM METHOD GET gt lt INPUT TYPE HIDDEN NAME Cmd VALUE STOR gt lt P gt Your mark for this course lt INPUT TYPE TEXT SIZE 5 NAME u Done AVTM VALUE u Done AVTM gt lt INPUT TYPE submit NAME ignore VALUE Submit gt lt P gt lt FORM gt ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 56 If the user enters 10 and presses the Submit button the browser will request the page with the following URL http 130 95 52 28 8080 jellyfish soybomb Baking_230 Cmd STOR amp Done SFAVTM 10 amp ignore Submit The 2F combination is the encoded character which cannot appear in a query string The purpose of the STOR command is to store data from an HTML form so the above form or emulated form will in theory edit the value of the student s mark for the Baking 230 course 4 The point here is that a knowledgeable user can emulate any HTML form at all by typing the right string into the Location field of the browser and can attempt to set user tree or even task tree variables We cannot rely on students not knowing about this particularly if you use METHOD GET in your forms since the GET method reveals the query string in the Location field of the browser In order to provide real security we have to have a system that will do the right thing even if improper requests are made e g a student changing his or her own mark for an assessed question Fly
71. have to create an input file The file should be PURE TEXT i e not a proprietary format such as Microsoft Excel It should consist of tab delimited text The first row of data should be a list of column identifiers Subsequent rows are student data StudentNo Surname Initials FirstName 8431837 Scott NW Nathan 9422213 Abe G George The order of the columns is not important provided that the StudentNo column appears first It is OK to have additional columns of data the data will be stored with the new student records The name of this input file should be the name of the course followed by the string txt For example if your course is Dynamics1 create a text file called Dynamics1 txt ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 33 Choose the FlyingFish menu item File Load Class and locate your input file FlyingFish will think about the input for a few seconds and You should now see a great many new directories in the user tree Check that the UDB entries for students seem reasonable 5 5 The FlyingFish progress display monitor When you first start FlyingFish it shows a picture of a Fish and a few words However a detailed user display is also available Choose Show Progress from the View menu TCE OP part number leeks bes showa required teks im black and Penna vine tasks In grey Crk ors A tk name do simo mure diail ia be bares dinama
72. he Location If you look at a web page containing many graphics sounds movies Java applets and so on your browser must actually make a separate request for each item on the page Consider the following URLs http www mech uwa edu au dynamics index html http www mech uwa edu au dynamics The first URL is a request for a file called dynamics index html which is hopefully on the server called www mech uwa edu au But the second URL does not terminate with a file name The web server www mech uwa edu au will understand the second URL to mean please return the default file at the location dynamics The default file name is usually index html but some web servers define a different name e g default html or welcome html It may seem a little odd to refer to a file without giving the exact name but it has some advantages It makes the URL shorter and it also give a directory on a hard disk an identity of its own a sort of entry point The Web defines a very useful behaviour called relative referencing This means that a given document e g index html can contain a reference to another document which is expressed in a relative way Refer to Figure 11 eq htdocs root level of server C task C dynamics iu ME1112 default html _ body html DynEqnSheet Kinetics B default html B body html a Ordinary web site b Jellyfish task tree FIGURE 13 Directory trees and relative references In an ordinary
73. here is none for the problem set we return the one for the whole course To take the example further suppose that we determine that a particular student has a weakness in a particular subject We could write a file called hints html and put it in the user s tree at an appropriate place This particular user would then see the custom file when working at or below that level It will be seen from this example that it would be nice to be able to specify the hint file using G ut hints html meaning search in the User node then the Task node then climb up a level Unfortunately this syntax is not currently supported There is a danger in using the tree climbing notation indiscriminately If you are not careful you may end up giving a student access to a file you did not expect to For example if you inadvertently insert a file called t solution html then this could be the solution to the current problem or of any problem above this level in the current Branch 6 3 The header and footer If you have the served HTML version of the body html document open in Netscape you l notice that it does not start with the words Welcome Administrator It actually starts with a row of anchors and a horizontal rule You ll also have noticed that a similar header appears at the top of every page served by FlyingFish When FlyingFish processes a body html document it actually performs three operations 1 Process the file header ht
74. hite and yet most of the mask image is white If the user places a doughnut on the white region all the diagnostic tests fail The line Tension baffled This marker should be placed somewhere on the truss becomes active The colour name baffled is reserved and means any RGB colour not mentioned in the other diagnostic tests 10 4 Organisation of problem files If you follow the example CJavaMicrograph problems in the standard FlyingFish installation you can t go far wrong The arrangement of the files is not arbitrary and the applet will look for exact file names in exact relative positions Specifically the applet expects a directory arrangement like this problem directory body html containing applet tag problem gif or if you wish problem jpg maskO directory mask gif info file to protect mask gif image from prying eyes It is also possible but not essential to have a solution directory ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 89 11 Glossary Branch A path from the top of a tree structure to a particular node The first part of a Branch corresponds to a directory subdirectory path in a computer file system the latter part can refer to sub UDB entries in a single file See also UDB The Branch uniquely identifies the part of the problem set the student is currently working in It can be inserted into a page using the variable notation t branch Node Part of a tree structure which
75. in the info files this means that you can put a different solution_access UDB file into a problem set and it will override the higher level one You have control over several hundred solution info files and you also have the ability to make some problems or problem sets obey a different rule 7 2 Deadlines info Deadline and info Deadline stagger The deadline for a Node is implicitly the deadline for completing all the sub nodes The significance of the deadline depends on other qualities of the sub nodes for example whether any marks are attached to them Currently FlyingFish will only award marks for assessed problems before the deadline In future versions there will be additional info node tags to modify this default behaviour Here is an example of a Deadline key in an info file Deadline Fri 20 May 6 00PM You can create an info file with a Deadline key in any of the following places In the user tree for a particular user a private deadline for one student In the year tree or In the task tree The reason is that the standard search pattern for deadlines is like this Q u y t info Deadline It is probably a good idea to choose either the year tree OR the task tree and put all your deadlines there to avoid confusion Staggering and the deadline function Students tend to leave work until the last minute This means that in a large class your computer lab s can be overcrowded on the days that work is due We ha
76. incorrectly assume it is their local time and this could cause them to miss the deadline FlyingFish is wise to this sort of thing and will use clues in the messages sent by the web browsers the student machines to try to guess the time difference involved and then display times expressed in the local student time zone The GMT Offset value should be the number of seconds your time zone is offset from the time in Greenwich UK the time that used to be called GMT but is now called UTC Universal Coordinated Time Positive values are for places to the West of Greenwich and negative values are for places to the East according to longitude This value could in theory be obtained from the Date amp Time control panel but this separate control in the ini file has some advantages For example if you are hosting services on behalf of a university in another time zone you might choose to make the GMT Offset match your client s time rather than your own 8 5 persistent These keys enable or disable persistent HTTP connections HTTP 1 0 standard only They are one of only a very few parts of FlyingFish that allow you to make a distinction between clients students using Netscape and those using Internet Explorer By default persistent connections are enabled for both browser types and you probably should just leave it that way Persistent connections are much faster and there is essentially no penalty for using them 8 6 license
77. inetics below body html in other words we will have lost the path element down because the browser erroneously treated it as a file name If this discussion has given you a headache don t worry about it Just remember to put a trailing slash character on the relative path to a directory It does no harm to cultivate the habit of reading thing as thing directory 4 5 The year tree and parallel directory structures The year tree is used to store information that changes from semester to semester such as student visit counts forums and deadlines for assessed problems This sort of volatile information is not portable if you were to give a task directory e g a whole course to someone they are unlikely to be interested in your deadlines 8 The standard installation starts with body html as the default file name everywhere However it is possible to change this and even to have different default file names in different parts of the task tree This is explained in the section on the mapping file ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 26 So how does the FlyingFish associate deadline information with task information By the use of the Branch The Branch can be tacked on to any of the root directories Consider the Branch me1112 kinetics TABLE 1 Using the Branch to identify tasks deadlines and student records Tree Root directory Full path after addition of branch task FlyingFish t
78. ing2 Boolean operators or expression1 expression2 and expression amp amp expression2 not lexpression brackets In some future version of FlyingFish it will be possible to do arithmetic operations as well as comparisons However these are not supported at the moment Examples of acceptable condition expressions string1 string2 1 0 u user Auth Developer 23 Note the use of quotation marks around a variable identifier The variable is inserted BEFORE the expression is evaluated so the variable value will also appear in quotes and can be compared as a string If the quotes were left off then it would be a syntax error because we would be asking for an illegal comparison like this Student Developer or even Developer Developer The order of precedence of the various operators is based on that in C C and Java Brackets are evaluated first followed by negations equalities and inequalities followed by AND and OR For absolute clarity make good use of brackets A test document containing a range of acceptable and unacceptable conditional statements can be found in the standard installation Follow the links to Authoring test_area expressions A printed form of this test file can also be seen in Appendix 4 ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 40 6 5 Inserting an entire document It is very useful to be able to insert an entire
79. ingFish uses the authority level of the actual user the one who gave a password to determine whether information is to be believed when it comes in Users at Helper level and above can modify any user or task UDB without question A Helper level user submitting the form above really could set the student s mark for the Baking 230 task although the STOR command is not the correct way to do it Users at Guest and Student level cannot modify any user or task UDBs unless specific permission is granted There are times when we do want Student level users to have control over a user variable For example consider the admin page where users can set their preferred name FORM METHOD POST gt lt INPUT TYPE HIDDEN NAME Cmd VALUE STOR gt lots of other input fields lt P gt Preferred name lt INPUT TYPE text NAME user Name Preferred VALUE u user Name Preferred SIZE 20 gt lt P gt more input fields lt INPUT TYPE submit NAME ignore VALUE Submit gt lt FORM gt 14 Don t panic students can t really change their own marks Read on 15 The STOR command just stores things it is not smart enough to recalculate higher level marks Mark changes are accomplished with the MARK command which is effectively a STOR that also invokes the standard Done mechanism at the current level ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 57 Using the rules given above students might w
80. irectory structure is an exact analogy of the structure in the task tree This is how FlyingFish knows which tasks this user has done and what marks were awarded and so on Be aware that problems can arise if you make changes to the task tree after some students have started to solve problems Suddenly the template in the task tree will no longer match the records stored in the user directories and the results can be unpredictable and are usually bad Future releases of the system will include administrative tools to allow editing of live trees e g parallel editing of 300 student records For now it is a good practice to avoid making major changes to the task tree after the start of a semester Pee Sn FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 30 5 Creating and managing user records 5 1 Impersonating another user The FlyingFish generates most web pages dynamically based on user information In other words the page you see at a certain Branch might look quite different to another user 5o it is helpful to have a way to quickly check the way the pages look to other people You could do this by getting the UserIDs and passwords of the other users and logging in using these details but there is another way The syntax of the URL to view a particular Branch can include the ID of a user like this http 130 95 52 240 8080 jellyfish student Dynamics 100 Kinetics The path element student is understood to mean show me thi
81. is warning will go away when you obtain a valid license key and install it in your 6 It is possible that the CD ROM will have a later version of the executable so it may well be called something else like FFish152 exe It is also possible that your computer is set up so that it hides the exe suffix and in this case you would see only a file called e g FFish152 ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 12 jellyfish ini file Do not worry about this for the time being your server will work fine for two hours and you can always restart it to get another two hours of operation The initial window of the FlyingFish server is simple by design the idea is to get the server running as quickly as possible There is another display mode in which you can get an overview of what the users of the system have been doing Select Show progress from the View menu You should see something like Figure 2 imi FlyingFish 8080 Iof XI File Edit View Help _Up admin Administrator 9961377 Foghorn NS 9977862 Irving WI nathan Scott NW student No Name Fan roo Er Tm EN 0 LI At H 1 5 T 0 student Pathology 330 Z FIGURE 2 FlyingFish progress display Before we go on I should say something about the FishMinder When you started FlyingFish you may have noticed that two programs came to life one called FlyingFish and one called FishMinder FishMinder has a window like Figure 3 FIGUR
82. ith large chunks deleted to save space arjeapplication x arj au audio basic avi video msvideo bin application octet stream bmpzimage x windows bmp htmstext html htmlstext html html header footerz1 html process 1 je application x javascript js no_escape 1 txt text plain txt neader_footer 1 default_file body html Most of the lines in the file are of the form XyZ MIME type where xyz is the file suffix of a file type on a Windows computer For example if the FlyingFish is asked to return a file called thing txt it will also return the MIME type found using the search t mapping txt i e using the mapping file above MIME type text plain The search t makes it possible to override a high level mapping file by putting another one at a lower part of the task tree i e in a subdirectory Note that you don t have to copy all the keys to the overriding mapping file only the ones you are changing ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 54 mapping files can also contain some additional keys All of the possible keys are in the example mapping file above key effect xyz header_footer 1 Files of type xyz are returned with the t header html and t footer html attached xyz process 1 Files of type xyz are processed as though they were Jellyfish enhanced HTML This means that substitutions are performed and the escape character is
83. le Each line of the file contains one key value pair The key can contain hierarchical divisions for example User Name Each user has a directory and these directories contain a number of files for example user and status UDBs Collectively these UDB files describe who the user is and what he or she is allowed to do Later on we shall also see that each user directory stores an image or analogy of the entire task tree as a record of what work is said to have been completed So we can now interpret the tag status User Name fully The symbol tells FlyingFish to insert a file or variable There is no leading character before the word status so this is a relative reference to something By default variables are assumed to be user variables There is a syntax extension to allow other types of variables to be accessed more later So FlyingFish knows that it is looking for something with absolute path FlyingFish root user admin status User Name The FlyingFish server searches for a file in the absolute path and loads the file if found In this case it finds the user admin status file Then it searches the file for the key User Name and finds the value Administrator This value replaces the tag status User Name and is therefore seen by the user when the processed HTML is received 6 2 Tree climbing references The full syntax for inserting a file or variable is modifiers path name If the modifier
84. lem View our aonaton record Welcome Administrator Thos is the Bret time you have logged in Aaiaoe iach is a Japanese peeing be somesne yon hove never dret before Your curent Avthonty level amp fi Examples Authari estore Bor the J h Erronment Exzibzlog 330 Enpre erna 100 Drmamics FIGURE8 The front page after setting a password You should explore the links from the front page The basic FlyingFish package contains only essential files and some examples in the Authoring area To look ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 16 at the Pathology Statics or Dynamics course material you will first have to install some more files 2 8 Installing a course from the CD ROM It s easy to install a course from the CD ROM 1 Quit the FlyingFish if it is running 2 Open the courses directory on the CD 3 You will have to unzip the files into the correct final directory Do not unzip them onto your hard disk because you might then have hundreds of unwanted files scattered everywhere For example if you are installing the Dynamics 100 problem set you would unzip it into the directory c FlyingFish task Dynamics_100 4 Restart the FlyingFish The basic FlyingFish installation has dummy directories in the task tree so that you can see where to install course material feel free to replace them ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 17 3 Flying with the Fish examples of
85. lf HTML again something for a future release ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 68 lt H3 gt user lt H3 gt u directory lt TD gt lt TR gt lt TABLE gt u user Authority Developer t file_upload html Which in turn is mainly showing the results of function tags like t directory i e create a formatted HTML list of all files and folders in the task tree at this level The directory function is mainly to aid staff navigation but it is available in a limited form for use by students Staff see all files and folders students see only the folders This is not to improve security because FlyingFish does not rely on security by obscurity but so that a list shown to students will not be cluttered with other things In addition Student level users cannot see any directory listing from any tree except the task tree Suppose you are setting up a course in Origami You would normally provide links to each of the course topics on the page task root Origami_110 body html something like this A HREF paper gt Where to buy origami paper lt A gt lt BR gt lt A HREF swan gt Exercise 1 the Swan lt A gt lt BR gt A HREF cat gt Exercise 2X the Cat lt A gt lt BR gt Where paper swan and cat are all subdirectories i e subtasks of the Origami directory If you were feeling lazy or if the course contents changed dramatic
86. loited in the FlyingFish system more later 4 8 The web root and basic web server function The FlyingFish server is mainly intended to serve course material i e web pages containing problems for students to solve Such course material web pages are typically created on the fly by the server i e they are created as they are needed based on the contents of various files There are times though when nothing so complicated is required This is why there is an ordinary web root in the system If you start your FlyingFish server as described in chapter 2 you will notice that the address of the login page was something like http 130 95 52 48 8080 login html This is a request for the file login html that is in the htdocs directory The default file name is index html The FlyingFish web server is deliberately small and simple and as a result it is very fast It supports the original HTTP1 0 specification only and does not support CGI If you only want to serve normal HTML web pages images movies and so on the FlyingFish web server should serve your needs However if you want more elaborate behaviour you should probably also install an additional dedicated Web server such as O Reilly WebSite http www oreilly com Note that the two servers FlyingFish and your chosen Web server can exist side by side on the same machine provided that each one uses a different port number ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTA
87. mech uwa edu au nws ae 12 3 FTP server Download the latest binaries and course material Use a proper FTP client like WS FTP because you must enter a user name aeclient and password ask for this FTP server www mech uwa edu au directory ae 13 Appendix2 Frequently Asked Questions Do I have to use a Windows server The first version of this system was used by students at UWA in 1995 In 1995 and 1996 the server was a Macintosh We still love Macintoshes and do all our best work on them but the fact of the matter is that most academics have access to at least one Windows computer but there are plenty who have no access to a Macintosh So we gritted our teeth and re wrote the server for Win32 The answer to your question is yes you do have to have at least one Windows computer in your life in order to use this version of FlyingFish But try to keep this in perspective every other computer in your world can be something else Mac UNIX whatever as long as it can run a reasonable Web Browser Is it really so bad having just one Windows computer around Also have a little faith we will eventually release a fully compatible macintosh FlyingFish and all your course material will continue to work with it ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 91 14 Appendix3 How to find your own IP address If you are only planning to log in on the server computer i e if your web browser is running on the same comput
88. ml 2 Process and append the file body html 3 Process and append the file footer html Note that header html and footer html are given as absolute paths with the leading remember This means they are found at the root level of the task tree FlyingFish root task Open the file header html with a simple text editor You will see something like this ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 38 t myHeader html The master header html file is nothing more than a reference to another file The tag G t myHeader html searches upward from the current branch until a file with the name myHeader html is found This means that different parts of the task tree for example different courses can have different headers Here s an example of a typical myHeader html lt HTML gt lt HEAD gt lt TITLE gt u user Name Preferred t branch lt TITLE gt lt HEAD gt BODY BGCOLOR FFFFFF gt lt TABLE gt lt TR gt t branch 2 lt TD gt lt P gt lt a_ hrefz Up a TD lt TD gt lt A HREF Cmd LOGO gt Logout lt A gt lt TD gt lt TR gt lt TABLE gt lt HR gt Note that the file begins with the lt HTML gt and lt HEAD gt tags It also makes use of the variable insertion mechanism to set the title of the HTML document t branch is a special variable which gives the current Branch the user is looking at e g MS451 Kinetics PQ_3 It can be used on
89. n this node is also deemed complete and the Done mechanism is invoked for its parent or enclosing node This recursive process continues until we reach the top of the task tree the empty branch If this happens then the student is deemed to have finished the entire course and a message to that effect is generated More usually however some un Done node is found and because the search order matches the info Complete order this un Done node is something the student might very well go on with The branch of the un Done node is saved in the student s user UDB file under the key Branch suggested so that at any future time it can be returned quickly without an exhaustive search The detail of how FlyingFish knows that a particular problem node is Done depends on the problem type for that node The approach for the main classes of problem are explained separately below 6 1 An applet question is Done The security surrounding the java applet question type is reasonably high To keep it that way I don t intend to discuss it in too much detail here Suffice it to say that we consider it quite unlikely that students will be able to pirate the applet question done message successfully In other words if FlyingFish receives a message stating that a certain applet has been successfully completed and all security checks have been cleared it is reasonable to assume that the student really has solved the problem So the Done mechanism is simply invoked
90. nd so nothing will appear after nscott To get around this problem simply escape the symbol by putting a back slash character in front of it like this nscott mech uwa edu au ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 42 The symbol is not the only character to watch out for If your HTML is not looking right it could well be because you have forgotten to escape one of the following TABLE 2 Special characters Character Meaning Example Substitute a variable u user Name Family ELSE in conditional martini dry TRUE FALSE statement Escape character To show an symbol use Any of these special characters can be shown on the HTML page all you have to do is to put the escape character immediately before it e g If you want to show the escape character itself use two of them in a row like this NN This approach to special characters is analogous to the approach taken in the computer languages C C and Java When I say that a character is shown I mean that the Web Browser will receive the character i e it will appear in the file you see if you select view source from your Browser menu In a typical HTML file there are characters that are not intended to be seen by the user anything in a delimited tag for example Note that there are cases where special characters including the escape character will NOT be respected and will thus appear in
91. ndent conventions are explained in a later chapter 2 1 Setting up FlyingFish under Windows 95 98 or NT You should read this section if you need to set up a new FlyingFish server on a Windows computer For brevity we will refer to Windows 95 98 and NT using the generic name Win32 This name is used by programmers to distinguish the modern 32 bit Windows from the older 16 bit version 2 1 1 RECOMMENDED SERVER CONFIGURATION For smooth operation try to match or exceed all of the recommended server specifications since they are tested by time and by thousands of students Hardware Pentium 266 with 64Mb RAM and 2Gb HD 10 Mbit s EtherNet TCP IP connection with a fixed IP address pee Sa FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 9 Software Windows 95 or 98 or best of all Windows NT 4 0 build 1381 with service pack 3 or later The server computer may not be busy all the time and depending on your class size and other factors you may find that you can use it as usual In other words it s possible that the server can be your own desktop computer However if you find that the computer seems to slow down while students are using it or if the Performance indicators show that the CPU is very busy you will have to leave it alone to do its job of serving The whole point of a server is to serve files to someone who wants them So the server will need a decent internet connection For development work it is OK to h
92. ne tne 9 3 How to get started 9 4 Setting up a project for the single answer example esses eene nennen 9 5 Witing ANEW Ajonre sicci M 9 6 Importing the new problems into the Jellyfish tutorial environment Writing your own compatible Java applet sse 10 1 Write your own incompatible Java applet Application example the Java drag and drop question type 10 1 The problem image eese 10 2 Create the mask 10 3 Theassessor txt file CIOSSafy caste etes Appendix1 Staying in touch 12 1 emailaddresses tede a tete eite stet tee idee ca Sede cilia telas seto eere he Rod Ste 12 2 Web add resses c ccssssssssssesssssssssssessesessssessesessssssssssssussesussesussesussesussesussesusaesussesussesuesecascsssucassucsssussssucasseaseseaseaeeasanees 12 3 FIP server Appendix 2 Frequently Asked Questions sssssssssssssssssssssessssessssessssesssesssssessssseesssssessnessssnessssseesssnsesssseesssseessneeessnesss Appendix 3 How to find your own IP address sse tenente nennt tennittnenittenntennnienn Appendix4 Examples of expression syntax COLPECES VIAN laowcuun A Appendix5 Exercises to help you get started with the Fish 16 1 Basic server installation ccccecsssessssssessssssesessssssesssssscsescssssescsscscs
93. nly testing subkeys of user Course and the subkeys are the official course codes used by my University It is then a good idea to provide staff with an easy way to turn the student s flags on an off I do this through the admin page which has lt INPUT NAME user course 600101 TYPE hidden VALUE null gt lt INPUT TYPE checkbox u user course 600101 CHECKED Value 1 NAME u user course 600101 gt Engineering 101 When processed and displayed by the browser this turns into a checkbox which will switch the value of the user variable user course 600101 on or off ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 52 Usually I surround statements of this kind with a test on the authority level of the actual user so that students do not see the checkbox lt TABLE gt t authority lt 20 lt students see this version gt lt TR gt lt TD gt User ID lt TD gt lt TD gt u user UserlD lt TD gt lt TR gt lt TR gt lt TD gt Surname lt TD gt lt TD gt u user Name Family lt TD gt lt TR gt lt TR gt lt TD gt First name lt TD gt lt TD gt u user Name Given lt TD gt lt TR gt l staff version gt lt TR gt lt TD gt User ID lt TD gt lt TD gt lt INPUT TYPE text NAME 2 user UserlD VALUE u user UserlD SIZE 20 gt lt TD gt lt TR gt lt TR gt lt TD gt Surname lt TD gt lt TD gt lt INPUT TYPE text NAME user Name Family VALUE
94. note about Web browsers The issue of browser compatibility is important to us and we try to keep all options open at all times At the time of writing Netscape Navigator v4 5 or later works well on both Windows and Macintosh platforms Microsoft Internet Explorer v4 0 has been found to be less reliable when used with FlyingFish although it can still be used For the time being we encourage the use of Navigator ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 7 For the most up to date information about browser compatibility and more detail about known problems visit the Advance Education web site ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 8 2 Setting up FlyingFish The FlyingFish Environment consists of two parts There is a platform specific server which can take many forms A library of scripts One or more platform specific executables applications A set of Java servlets These different server forms have arisen historically and not all of them will be supported in the future Your main task however is to create the other part of the Environment the problem sets and user databases for your course These are completely platform independent This means that if you invest effort in creating new problems or new problem sets they will continue to work properly even if the server changes If you need to move your entire course including all users to a different computer or even a differ
95. nt mozilla 10 persistent msie 10 PKZip 9 relative referencing 21 Show progress 12 Starfish 5 tree t 10 tree u 10 tree y 10 web server function 23 WebSTAR 5 zip utility 9
96. nt to edit text containing the lt TEXTAREA gt tag in a lt TEXTAREAS gt so the lt TEXTAREA gt is terminated by the FIRST lt TEXTAREA gt tag that is encountered This can cause some very strange effects For the time being you should avoid editing files that contain the lt TEXTAREA gt tag because this could lead to corruption of the file 7 9 2 Directory There are times when it is helpful to provide users with a dynamic listing of all files at a particular Branch FlyingFish provides a convenient way to do this the directory function Log in as a Developer and then click the small link Directory at the bottom of any page You will see something like Figure 21 Figure 21 A typical directory listing The browser is actually showing the processed form of a file at the top level of the task tree called directory html lt TABLE gt lt TR gt lt TD ALIGN TOP gt lt H3 gt task lt H3 gt t directory lt TD gt lt TD ALIGN TOP gt lt H3 gt year lt H3 gt y directory lt TD gt lt TD ALIGN TOP gt 17 The obvious work around is for the FlyingFish to mangle the lt TEXTAREA gt tag into something else like lt _TEXTAREA gt when it is found in a file being edited But this makes me uncomfortable because it is confusing to the user to see arbitrary changes to files This may be an option in a future release The other obvious work around is to have an HTML editor e g in Java which is not itse
97. ntity 7 Load the Dummy class from the text file DummyCourse101 txt provided on the CD page 26 section 5 4 16 2 Editing web pages and creating new ones 8 Modify the front page using the on line editor so that it contains a link to a new course called Dummy101 Use the link marked Edit this file at the bottom of the page NOT the editor built into the Browser page 14 section 3 8 9 Use your new link to go to the non existant course and create a page at the new location 10 Use the directory and edit functions to create and modify the file c FlyingFish task Dummy101 info Add a key like this Student u user Course DummyCoursel101 11 Restart the FlyingFish server so that it shows your new course in the monitoring window 12 Use the monitoring window to navigate down to Dummy101 in the monitor and check that only the Dummy students appear at that level 13 Create a new problem set at the Branch Dummy101 set1 with sub directories for three practice questions and one assessed question 14 Set up the set1 body html file so that it shows the full name of the student in large letters at the top 15 Set up the info Complete records for Dummy101 and set1 page 40 section 7 1 16 17 18 19 20 ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 95 Create a problem in each of the directories you just made e g Dummyl101 set1 PO 1 You can recycle any problems available anywhere in the e
98. o it may be a good practice to save the previous HTML file before modifing it for each new problem this will save you the trouble of determining the new height and width again later on If your development environment does not allow you to run applets with debug support you will need to make use of the java console to get information about what the code is actually doing This means inserting lines of this kind System out printin carPosA nns carPosA This will make a string like carPosA 119 appear in the java console 9 6 Importing the new problems into the Jellyfish tutorial environment The standalone class is exactly that it is not connected to the FlyingFish tutorial environment and only exists to make it easier to write and debug new problems Once your new problem is working you will want to install it as something that students will use This means that the new problem will now be in contact with the server to get information about the student such as the ADVANCE EDUCATION FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 81 random seed for the random problem parameters and also to send information back such as whether the student has had an attempt at the problem It is easy to switch a problem from a Standalone version to a networked version You should create a new project file which compiles the networked versions because you will use a different set of libraries Instead of the set shown above
99. of your click are shown in the console window and you can then set the coordinates here correctly It is a little painful but you can get them right in one iteration it is OK to put words in either the HTML file for the problem or the problem gif image This is a demonstration problem so this next bit is to show the technique for mixing text and small graphics e g Greek symbols define some local integers to help position the text in neat rows int xPos 10 yPos 152 dyPos 20 DrawString with a capital D is defined in Standalone It is exactly like g drawString but it returns the x coordinate of the end of the string which we will need in a moment xPos DrawString g The car moves from B to A Find the change in position yPos now we need to draw the symbol delta S at the end of the previous string Image deltaS getimage getCodeBase deltaS gif note that images are drawn with the top left at the coordinates you specify whereas text is drawn with the coordinate at the bottom left of the first character So a correction is needed to place the image in the expected position on the line You will have to determine this by trial and error for each little image you make g drawlmage deltaS xPos yPos 9 this XPos add a full stop after the image xPos deltaS getWidth this ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 80 g drawString xPos yPos one more trick you might need dr
100. og in and then go to e g http localhost 8080 jellyfish admin license Because each of the license key subkeys hostIP software and expires contribute to the license string and the license string produces a unique license key you can t modify any of the strings without invalidating your license The process of applying for a new license is somewhat automated but at some point you will receive your new license key by email The email message will actually contain a complete license UDB entry of the following form license 1anz a8rq 9y4b license expires 31 Dec 2001 11 59PM license hostIP 130 95 52 241 license software FlyingFish We could have completely automated the process of getting a fresh license However we chose not to do this The main reason is that we consider it a fundamental security principal that the FlyingFish never modifies its own jellyfish ini file Therefore you will have to perform the following steps to install a fresh license 1 Quit your FlyingFish if it is running 2 Use a simple text editor like NotePad to edit the file jellyfish inil 16 The default settings for Windows are such that if you double click the jellyfish ini file it will probably open up in NotePad If not you will at least have the chance to select NotePad from a list of applications and it will then be used to open ini files from then on ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 63 3 Copy the four lines tha
101. ome reason this path needs to be changed we can change it ONCE in the master codebase html file rather than 200 times in each of the HTML files for the individual java applets The tag t appletvital html inserts a processed file from the task root called appletvital html Note that the processed file is inserted in the applet parameter list It gives us a way of passing some parameters to each applet that is instantiated in a flexible extendable way If each applet needs some new piece of information about the user or the environment we can simply modify the appletvital html file lt this HTML fragment is parsed and passed on to each JellyfishClient applet DON T EDIT THIS FILE unless you really know what you re doing gt u status User Auth Developer lt param name diagnostic value TRUE gt lt param name User value u status User gt ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 41 lt it is polite to always have a message that is shown if the user does not have Java gt You should be seeing a Java TM applet here Either your Web Browser does not support Java or it is turned off at the moment Note that the process of inserting a file can be recursive in the sense that a file can insert itself or there can be a series of insertions that form a closed loop This is one of very few ways in which you as a content author can cause the FlyingFish server to behave badly The server doe
102. or all question types Very like include in C or C public class Rect1010 extends Standalone This defines the new java class we are going to compile Note that the source file name MUST reflect the name of this class So if you change the name Rect1010 remember to also rename the source file Note that java is strongly case sensitive double carDistA carDistB Define variables which will be used in both of the methods procedures in this class These are sometimes called instance variables of the class The double type is just an 8 byte real number public void ChooseVariables This is the method which chooses random values for the problem parameters and also does all the calculations carDistA RangeRandom 40 120 1 carDistB carDistA RangeRandom 40 120 1 This is the standard way to choose random variables The RangeRandom function is defined by the libraries The arguments are min max step and the result is a double ClearErrorList Tells the superclass to forget any previously loaded list elements remember that the first error is the correct answer LoadError carDistA carDistB m 0 1 0 0 ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 79 The superclass keeps a list of numbers with some associated information This line loads an element into that list The first such element is taken to be the correct answer ans units title message severity c0 c1 c2
103. pplet questions FlyingFish will unconditionally grant access to a node if the user has a UDB file called Access in their user tree at the same level These files are created by FlyingFish in response to certain signals from a Java applet but not under other circumstances So access to a given node is granted if 1 The user has an Access file for the node or 2 There is no info file for the node or 3 The info Access Condition expression evaluates to TRUE 7 1 2 INFO COMPLETE If a given node contains twenty sub nodes how does FlyingFish know which if any of these are sub tasks that must be completed The info Complete value of a node specifies a list of sub tasks i e sub directories or sub nodes which must be deemed complete before this node is deemed complete The list can be explicit for example Complete PQ_1 PQ 2 PQ 3 PQ 4 AQ 1 AQ2 But this could become very tiresome if there are more than a few sub nodes So a wild card notation is allowed The list Complete PQ AQ Means all nodes with names matching PQ AND all nodes with names matching AQ must be completed The order of the elements in the list has only a very minor effect on the experience of the student All matching nodes ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 48 must be completed regardless of the order The order determines only the suggested branch which is the branch we present to the student as something
104. rameters to the student and require a numerical answer with units Problems that pose a problem in algebraic form and or require an expression as an answer 1 A product of the Quarterdeck Corporation http www starnine com 2 E g http www starfish com ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 6 Problems that present an image as well as some markers to be dragged onto the image Problems that allow the student to sketch a graph as the response and of course Multiple choice questions New problem sets are generated when an enthusiastic person either adapts existing problem types or creates a whole new problem type and then generates an appropriate sequence of questions for his or her students A problem set can consist of any number of problems of any type in any order Problems can also be linked together so that they share information The answer to the question Where can it be used depends on you The software can be applied to a wide range of subjects from high school to postgraduate level But the degree to which it can be successfully adapted to new situations depends on the amount of time and skill you have Almost anyone can set up a FlyingFish server and use an existing problem set The instructions in this document will lead you through the process even if you are a new computer user If you are working only at this level you can have something running with only an afternoon s
105. re can it be used eccccsssssssssescssssesessssssessssssesessssssessesssesssssscsessesescsusscassesscssscsuesssssessesssessessacsesseassesuessaeseeseaeacseesees 5 1 4 A note about Web browsers 26 2 Setting up FlyingFish 8 2 1 Setting up FlyingFish under Windows 95 98 or NT cccssssssessssseessessssesseessesssssssessnesssssssessesssseaseesnsessnesseenss 8 2 2 Check that the FlyingPish i WOrkit s scuscsiessctessseccecsesesencesesoosntsieesvascbiosessassssentasceveazsiscoossslesceisvaspoueceaguseasecoasbeaseta 11 2 3 Installing a course from the CD ROM csssssssssssssessssesssessessseessssssssessseesseesssssssecssesesseessseesseessseessseesseessnsenseessneent 16 3 Flying with the Fish examples of what this thing does seen enne nnns 17 3 1 WVariablesrcemnendecednnlo MdL eM UI DN uM LL NL 17 3 2 Javarapplet questions sirio airar tue tieni mt de ee ite E E aA 17 3 3 Multiple choice question MCO cissccscsssccissssccusiesoisecesentendinsscasicesitvencasecsvadnstoutiecassestusn scipicesuepelsessitbonessiunsausncans 17 3 4 J Drag and drop doughnut Java Questions cssscssssssssessessseesseessseesssessssesssessseessusesseessneesssessneessnssessneessessneessess 18 3 5 Insert the word qQuestiOnsss ccisicsasecossscssicseasssacecssetcasncossttcastsasnstasestsnsnsisstacescucntvipetsantcudstousndactoudectasstsasheduisbaseediachsussiis 19 3 6 Tutor marked i 3 7 Mpcand matchs anestesia ct delati etn
106. regions are plotted on the three dimensional structure of a variable domain it can be seen that they are brought in the folded structure In the antibody molecule antigen binding site d light chains brings together the 7 loops from each chain to create a singllFab surface which forms the J at the tip of each Done FIGURE 12 An insert the word ITW problem The Done button can be pressed at any time and the student s current work is checked If any word is correctly inserted the pop up menu is removed and a bold coloured word replaces it 3 6 Tutor marked Sometimes there is no substitute for a written answer to a problem Such problems must be assessed by human tutors because computers are very bad at understanding free text and I am not smart enough to even try this It is easy to set up an HTML form which students fill in with their answer Staff can then read the work and give marks 3 Mix and match The problem types shown in this section are representative only if you are willing to do some development work you might be able to create a completely new type of problem for your students The Java question type is particularly flexible since anything you are able to program can in principle be made into an assessed task Note that the problem types shown can be mixed up in any order you like Each problem type obeys certain minimum standards to keep the system informed about what the student has done So if you
107. rimary red For each doughut Label there is a single UDB key at the top level of the file However the key can have many sub keys which are explained below and which inform the behaviour of the doughnut being defined Note carefully there are doughnut labels and there are mask colour names They can be the same if you wish but need not be Now let s examine the detailed information pertaining to doughnuts Consider doughnuts with the label Tension key meaning Tension 7 There will be 7 doughuts with the label Tension initially all on top of each other at the right edge of the applet Tension min 3 We will require the user to get three doughuts of this kind in the right place Tension radius 40 The user is not allowed to position two of these doughnuts closer than this radius from one another Tension color red This is the colour the doughnuts will have Now we are getting into the assessment part This is where the order of lines in the pseudo UDB file starts to be important What follows is a series of tests that we will perform on a doughnut to classify where it is on the mask i e what semantic region colour it is over The order of tests is important because the CJavaMicrograph applet actually supports multiple masks something which is not explained here too complicated and this is an introductory exercise Each diagnostic test is of the form Doughnut label mask colour name feedback message ADVANCE
108. row of data in the class list is generated by processing the file class list row html in the context of one user In this example the class list row html file contains lt TR gt lt TD gt lt A HREF t cgipath html admin gt u user UserlD lt A gt lt TD gt lt TD gt u user Name Family u user Name Initials lt TD gt lt TD gt u Done a ATTE lt TD gt lt TD gt u lt TD gt u lt TR gt Done a AVTM lt TD gt Done a MXTM lt TD gt It will be seen that the columns of the table are a link to the user s admin area i e the name and password change page a full surname initial identifier the number of attempts at assessed problems at this level or below the total mark awarded for assessed problems at this level or below 19 This is explained in another section use the table of contents and look in the chapter Special Files ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 70 the maximum possible mark for assessed problem completed at this level or below It is possible to customise the class list in a given course copy and then edit the file class_list_row html This file is found by climbing search so a file at a lower level will override one at a higher level ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 71 9 The Forum It is increasingly common for students to have access to computers outside of scheduled class times e g at 2am from home If a s
109. rs to work as users will expect ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 75 The line lt H4 gt t publicID 9961377 t date 951919921 lt H4 gt is processed to become the name date time string associated with the Forum message publicID turns a userID into something suitable for viewing by the current actual user date displays the time of the message correctly regardless of the time zone of the user or server It is probably a good practice not to edit this line in a Forum unless you really know what you are doing It is OK to delete it if you plan to delete the whole message but be aware that users could then try to jump to a non existant message in this case they would see the first message in the Forum because the lt A NAME tag would not be found 9 5 Behind the scenes where is the Forum data Forum files are stored in the year tree along with other ephemeral data such as user count statistics and system log files The idea here is that the task tree contains data that is inherent in a course or set of courses and which will not change from year to year However the year tree stores anything which will probably be refreshed each year We have the practice of renewing the year tree each year or semester It s easy to do we simply change the jellyfish ini file to show a new Path e g tree y 2001b The old year tree need not be deleted it contains important historical data and Forum me
110. s value at the server t deadline ticks is the value of the date string deadline converted to a ticks value and t ticks 9 49AM Wed 01 Dec 1999 converts the date string to a ticks value Some functions are context sensitive For example the date function applied to a date string simply cleans it up according to the section above on date strings However you can also apply the date function to a ticks value and the result will be what you expect xpression Notes Result t branch Authoring test_area functi Authoring test area fun ons tions t trim_branch Authoring test_area functi Authoring test area fun ons tions t version The version number of the v1 39 server a t deadline The deadline for this task in 6 00PM Mon 30 Dec 2002 a standard human readable form t deadline ticks The deadline for this task as 1041271200 a number of seconds since 1 an 1970 t ticks he time according to the 47591551 server as a number of seconds since 1 Jan 1970 1l This will only be different from branch if the current file is NOT body html ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 45 t ticks date he time according to the 11 52AM Tue 11 Jan 2000 server in human readable form t ticks 9 49AM Wed The ticks function can also 944041740 01 Dec 1999 convert a human readable date into a number of seconds which is useful hen you wan
111. s 130 95 16 27 farm port 5555 http port 8080 admin email nscott mech uwa edu au admin name Dr Nathan Scott timeout idle 1800 GMT Offset 28800 persistent mozilla 1 persistent msie 1 license lanz a8rq 9y4b license expires 31 Dec 2001 11 59PM license hostIP 130 95 52 241 license software FlyingFish Each line of this file is significant and will be explained later For now edit only the following lines Change admin email to show your own email address Change admin name to your own name 4 The Windows Explorer has some user settable preferences One of these preferences is that certain files are hidden by default In other words it s possible that on your computer you will not initially be able to see the file jellyfish ini because it is treated as one of these special hidden files To see the file you will have to alter the preferences of the Explorer To do that use the View menu and select the menu item Options Choose the setting Show all files 5 I keep a shortcut for NotePad on my desktop at all times To create a chortcut right click the Start menu and select Open Find NotePad in the Programs directory Then right drag it onto the desktop One of the options you will see is Create shortcut here Then to edit a file using NotePad just drag the file onto the shortcut you made easy ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 11 If you know what your GMT UT
112. s are missing then they are set to the default value u explained below Here are the currently defined modifier strings and their meanings Modifier string Meaning u Search in the current branch of the User tree t Search in the current branch of the Task tree u Start from the current branch of the User tree Search by climbing upward through the User tree until either the target is found or we reach the top an empty branch eae Se FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 37 t Start from the current branch of the Task tree Search by climbing upward through the Task tree until either the target is found or we reach the top an empty branch These strings can be combined to some extent For example u t means climb up the User tree and then if necessary climb up the task tree This ability to specify the search pattern for a file or variable is tremendously powerful For example we might begin to include files with the title hints html in the task tree If each course topic and problem node has a file called hints html then we could specify it with simply t hints html But what if some nodes do not have a hints html file We could instead specify t hints html This would insert the first file called hints html found by searching upward from the current Branch This means that if there is no hint file associated with this problem we return the one associated with this problem set Or if t
113. s not currently test for circular insertions and it would cheerfully continue inserting files into themselves until all available resources were exhausted Then it would crash 6 6 Testing for the existance of a file or UDB value Sometimes it is helpful to be able to use a conditional statement to determine if a file or UDB value exists The syntax is very similar to the syntax for inserting the file or variable To insert a variable or file we write modifiers path To test whether the variable or file exists we write modifiers path You can think of the second version as returning either 0 or 1 depending on whether the variable or file exists So we can construct conditional statements of this form u user Name Preferred You have not entered a Preferred name The words You have not entered a Preferred name will only appear in the final HTML file if the condition evaluates to TRUE i e if there is NOT a UDB value user Name Preferred 6 7 Escape characters You now know that in the FlyingFish Environment the symbol is special since it always introduces a variable or file insertion tag But the symbol is useful for other purposes as well for example when giving an email address If a file contained the following email address nscott mech uwa edu au FlyingFish will treat it like this nscott try to insert variable mech uwa edu au by relative reference Naturally this variable will not be fou
114. s page as if I were the user called student It has to have the prefix and it must be the first path element after the jellyfish keyword By entering another user s userID here you create a distinction between the actual system user and the being system user the impersonated user Low level system users e g Student users can enter this additional path element if they wish but it will be ignored and they will only see their own pages The actual user is always the user who entered a password to authenticate him or herself to the server The authority level of the actual user is taken seriously by the server and it limits or grants access to executive functions The being user is whatever user name appears after the in the URL provided that the actual user has sufficient authority to impersonate the being user If the actual user has insufficient authority the being userID is ignored and might as well be the actual userID A simple tool is provided for quickly getting access to student pages without having to remember their IDs If you visit the user information page admin you will see some administrative links at the bottom of the page including a Class List Follow the link to the Class List and you will see something like this Class list To change the appearance cf the bet edi the file chep bet row hmi To mpersonaie a student ie to see the system from the paint of new of the student click on the student ID in th
115. s the UDB file it goes even deeper and identifies a single key within the file The path FlyingFish user nathan user Name Family identifies the value Scott The usefulness of the extended path idea will become clearer later on when we explore the syntax for substituting variables into HTML documents 48 File caching vs file editing The FlyingFish is optimised for high volume student use rather than for the relatively infrequent editing work of staff Part of the speed optimisation is a series of internal caches for frequently accessed files The disadvantage of these caches is that they may persist even when you have modified a file on the hard disk See Figure 17 P copies Eo e of RAM file can be sent to M reads Cul users quickly file at startup Hard disk file Cached SS User edits disk file Y7 Gn RAM using Notepad Users will not see this new Changed disk file information FIGURE 17 The problem with caches So to successfully modify served files i e the contents of the task year and user trees you must take one of two approaches ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 29 1 Quit the FlyingFish server before making changes then restart it 2 Use only the on line administrative and editing tools more about this later 4 9 Parallel directory structures are not foolproof As a user surfs the task tree new directories and files are created in his or her user directory The new d
116. se watch the status bar at the bottom of the window it always shows the full path name of the task you are navigating to imi FlyingFish 8080 Iof XI File Edit View Help Up Rectilinear Curve_xy Curve_nt 9961377 Foghorn NS 0 DEE EEE 9977862 Irving WI 0 ICCC TTT Te ee O i TTTTTT nathan Scott NW 00 O n L1 OO no user Dynamics 100 Curve nt PQ 3 FIGURE 19 More detailed view of the Dynamics 100 course ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 34 To return to a higher level view i e to view a shorter Branch click the Up button just above the list of users To change a student s mark you must first navigate to a view of the task in question that shows the lowest level of detail You can only change marks on assessed problems Click on the brown box for an assessed problem and then drag the mouse vertically You will see a display in the status bar about what the mark was and what it will be when you release the mouse Users can be sorted in various ways try the View menu to see the current options If you sort by Progress students who have fallen behind will appear at the bottom of the list I apologise for the slowness of the display if you are viewing a large class it can take quite a few minutes to just find the students you are interested in The display is slow because it stores a minimum of information in RAM most files are left on the hard disk most of the time This
117. se it have won many awards for both excellence and innovation in teaching 1 2 Why is it called FlyingFish The 1997 version of this system was called Starfish because it worked with a Web server called WebSTAR However we had to change the name because it was too similar to the name of several existing commercial ventures The name we initially chose was Jellyfish but it never really caught on Jellyfish are just not very inspiring This release is called FlyingFish because it is faster and smaller than its predecessors The name Jellyfish is now used for a set of standards for course materials developed collaboratively by Dr Kevin Judd and Dr Nathan Scott of UWA It is useful to have a name for the tutorial system since it is easier to say The FlyingFish will respond like this than The server will The actual name is not terribly important since it is rarely seen by students 1 3 Where can it be used At the time of writing problem sets have been developed for Engineering Dynamics Statics and Thermodynamics First year University Calculus Statistics and Linear Algebra Second year Pathology identification of cancerous tissue Some of these problem sets are quite extensive and represent an entire year of tutorial problems The system is useful in all of these different subjects because it allows so many different kinds of problem type Here are some examples Problems that provide randomised numerical pa
118. sed and has not been converted to run under Win32 The keys identify the IP address and IP port number of the farm software More detail about the use of the farm software can be found in the documentation for the Calmzth system ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 60 8 3 http port This is the port number used by this instance of FlyingFish when it is running You can use any port number you like in the range 0 65535 with some conditions see below Internet Protocol IP port numbers have been around for a few years now since the early 1960s and as a result there are some conventions which it is good to be aware of The first is that on a given computer there can be only one listening port with a given number If one program starts listening for connections on port 80 and then another program tries to start another listening port with the same number the second program will get an internal error and will not be able to continue This makes sense because otherwise it would be like having two houses in one street with the same number who gets the mail Note that there can be any number of connecting ports the more usual kind with a given number You have probably experienced this already because you have had many instances of Netscape Navigator running simultaneously and each one usually connects on port 80 Secondly some port numbers are associated with certain web services
119. so the result could well be quite strange However FlyingFish is smarter than that and corrects the HTML syntax of messages posted to Fora Note that the example message includes a carriage return and that this would normally be ignored in HTML i e the resulting message as rendered by the browser would all be on one line As a concession to users who do not necessarily know HTML FlyingFish replaces carriage returns with lt BR gt tags so that the message looks OK when it is displayed by the browser The Syntax correcting mechanism is only invoked when a message is posted to a Forum by the normal means it is NOT invoked if you edit the file using the Edit this file link FlyingFish assumes that a staff level user knows HTML and will allow you make a mess of it if you want to 9 2 The Forum change list When a user adds a message to a Forum how do we find out about it At the moment the only way to see what has happened in the Forum is to visit a special page that shows Forum changes Go to the Front page and then select the link Recently changed forums You should see something like this 21 Because a Student level user cannot impersonate any other user let alone a staff user If they edit the userID part of the URL they will simply be shown their own admin page ADVANCE Ppucation FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 74 FIGURE 23 Recently changed forums It s a list of lists and the nested structur
120. ssages which can be used to refine your teaching However the new tree y path identifies a new tree so students have the chance to post messages into clean Fora without seeing the messages of the previous semester The year tree has a directory structure which is parallel to the task tree and the Fora are stored with the same file names as their task tree shadows The main Forum for a particular branch for example is a file called body html somewhere in the year tree ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 76 9 Introduction to Java and FlyingFish the single answer question type 9 1 Standalone Java The applets that allow students to solve assessed problems on line are networked i e they send and receive network messages This can be contrasted with the more usual kind of Java applet that does not try to use the network and thus stands alone it works without the FlyingFish server If you are interested in writing some new Java applets for a course a good way to start is to get your applets working in Standalone form before you try to connect them to the server Standalone applets are easier to understand and debug 9 2 The Single answer question standalone shell Although in theory one can write an arbitrary Java applet and turn it into a working problem there is also something to be said for recycling existing problem code The key question is whether your educational needs can be satisfied by adapting one of
121. t A gt lt UL gt You can view the document yourself by dragging the file onto a simple text editor such as the Windows Notepad Do not try to use a complex piece of software such as Microsoft Word because the latest versions are too clever and they will try to interpret the HTML tags rather than just showing the text The file looks very much like standard HTML except that there are some unusual tags In the following sections the meaning of each of the special tags will be explained 6 1 Inserting a variable In simple terms the tag status User Name means replace this tag with the user variable status User Name To see exactly how FlyingFish deals with this use your file system to find the file FlyingFish root user admin status Open this file with the simple text editor You ll see something like this Branchz MS451 Curve rt rel PQ 6 solution Branch Prevz MS451 Curve rt rel PQ 6 Branch Suggested finished html Code 1651327636 Code Expires 902398452 Code Prev 1539142932 Code Prev Expires 902398436 ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 36 Remote Addr 130 95 52 239 Request 1587 Tick 903367852 Tick Prev 888149163 User admin User Auth Developer User Name Administrator User Seed 1 752457583 This is an example of a UDB or Universal Data Base file FlyingFish uses files of this type to store most information about users and some information about tasks The idea is very simp
122. t start license like the example above from the email message 4 Paste the four lines into your jellyfish ini file replacing the lines that are already there 5 Close the NotePad window and save changes 6 Test your FlyingFish and check that the new license has been accepted Strictly speaking only the license 1anz a8rq 9y4b needs to be replaced provided the on line license application has been used but it does no harm to install all the fresh strings since they make a matched set ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 64 8 The Done mechanism We have seen how FlyingFish knows what work the student must complete and how access to nodes is granted In this chapter we explore how FlyingFish knows when a student has completed some work There are two main kinds of nodes 1 Wrapper nodes that contain one or more problems and 2 Problem nodes A problem node is associated with a single task or activity we expect the student to complete If FlyingFish receives authenticatable information that such a task has been completed it simply marks the node as Done and then activates the Done mechanism for the parent or enclosing node You will recall that a student is required to complete everything that matches the info Complete string at a given level The Done mechanism enforces this It searches the nodes identified in the info Complete string in the order given If every matching node is completed the
123. t to compare two dates An example of a date 9 49AM Wed 01 Dec 1999 9 49AM Wed 01 Dec 1999 an argument The date is cleaned up completed if selection stored in the user tree Parmesan Limberger u user Authority The authority level of the AuthInt being user as an integer between 0 and 50 a user Authority The authority level of the AuthInt actual user as an integer between 0 and 50 ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 46 7 Special files In an ordinary web site all files are available for viewing provided a user knows what location to type into the browser In the FlyingFish system there are some additional files in the task tree which are not meant for direct viewing but which govern a range of behaviours including Setting deadlines and available marks for tasks Setting access restrictions Setting some system preferences Setting MIME type mappings And so on This section explains some of the more important special files used by the FlyingFish Note that it is OK to define your own additional files and it is also OK to add additional keys to these special files The UDB file format is deliberately extensible and open and your additional keys will not affect the existing ones There is a small chance that conventions you define for your own purposes could conflict with future system extensions but we will deal with this when it happens 7 1 Course requirements
124. t with it where the IP address is of course the address of your computer This is slightly simpler than e g ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 61 http 130 95 52 28 8080 You can run any number of FlyingFish instances on one computer provided that each one has a distinct http port number 8 3 admin The admin email and admin name keys should be the email address and name of someone who can fix server problems or at least someone who regularly reads email The FlyingFish knows this address internally as the Server Admin address and it can be displayed using the special CGI variable reference A HREF 2 mailto Q c CGl Server Admin gt Send email to the WebMaster lt A gt This address is also used in the unlikely event that an error has occurred internally but no error html file can be found In this case a hard wired error message is shown and it includes the admin email address 6 4 timeout idle If a user stops working without logging out it is a good practice to time out the user after a reasonable interval The timeout idle value is the number of seconds FlyingFish will wait before logging a user out We have found that 20 to 40 minutes is a good value for first year students 8 5 GMT Offset Increasingly we have students who are distributed across several time zones If such students all have a deadline at 6pm server time it would be impolite to show 6 PM to each of them They will
125. table compiling and running Java code BUT you do not have to know much Java You will be amazed at how little of the language you need on order to write Engineering or Physics problems You will be working from an existing code template and most of the new material you write will be numerical calculations very like C or Fortran If you want to learn Java then I recommend The Java Tutorial by Campione amp Walrath The main thing you need right now is a Java compiler I use Metrowerks CodeWarrior which is cool inexpensive and works on both Windows and Macintosh computers Some of my colleagues seem to like Microsoft Visual J The only compiler I will warn you NOT to try is the free Java Development Kit or JDK which is available for download from Sun It is tempting because it is free BUT it is command line based and is completely unfriendly to a novice developer In other words you will be driven mad because you will not be able to control it or understand what it is doing So spend a few hundred dollars and get a proper GUI development environment 9 4 Setting up a project for the single answer example Here is a picture of my CodeWarrior project on a Win32 computer Linde dar lage Tu Joe f pplei es ieu z Fin xi Com Daal Eph ihien paja 1 Bg UErsg irerovin iii 12552 oo HH CE vv List cla 157 0 m CFan AFAFA piat na 0 m lieth claps p a B B timida caz Pr B Egi uar of oO E Bi Feii ria 23 loe E
126. the semantically distinct regions in the problem image This will be clear if I show you the mask for Figure 24 FIGURE 26 The mask image for the Statics problem of Figure 24 You will notice that there is a fair amount of blank space around Figure 22 This is because the solid regions in the mask have to line up exactly with the problem image In the photographic industry two such aligned images are said to be registered This will be clear if we show the mask image with the problem image superimposed pixel for pixel Yellow Force Green Yellow Green Green Yellow Yellow Yellow FIGURE27 The mask image with the problem image superimposed The colours of the semantic regions of the mask are shown in italics since you are probably reading a grey scale paper copy ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 86 Note that the sausage shaped mask regions are quite a lot bigger than the corresponding truss elements We do not care whether the student puts a marker exactly on a truss element near enough is good enough Also note and this may not be clear if you have a black and white copy of this document that some of the regions in the mask image are solid red and some are solid green The joints of the truss have solid yellow circles over them explained below The remainder of the image is solid white There are no half tones and the edges of the coloured regions are pixel sharp and jagged
127. the existing problem types or whether you really do need something quite new In this section we will discuss the process of writing problems that look like Figure 16 S Positive direction 119m 179m The car moves from B to A Find the change in position AS FIGURE 20 A screen shot of the applet Rect1010 in action This is NOT an arbitrary java applet it is a special type of applet that knows how to draw a background picture choose and display numbers for some physical system calculate the expected answer and a range of expected incorrect answers receive student input in the form of a single numerical answer with units provide feedback for the student answer This networked version of this problem is derived from a standard Jellyfish library class called CSingleAnswerQuestion which in turn is derived from more abstract classes that know how to communicate with the server The single answer problem type is not very exciting to look at but it is very easy to write new problems of this kind and if the problems are carefully designed they can be very helpful for students pee Sa FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 77 In other words this apparently boring problem type can be used to set up a very efficient and helpful tutorial set We have used problems of this type to teach students in Engineering Dynamics since 1995 9 3 How to get started In order to write single answer questions you need to be comfor
128. tudent needs help at such a time what resources are available Email most likely unless the student does not have an account But then you must ask yourself do I really want to receive 100 email questions about a particular tutorial problem We have found that a simple bulletin board system can be tremendously helpful in teaching and FlyingFish makes it easy to set up and use such a system In fact you might choose to use FlyingFish mainly as bulletin board support for some other form of teaching i e you might not have any computer marked tutorial problems at all Here we are using bulletin board to mean an accumulation of messages rather like the bulletin board in a shopping centre only on computer The idea is that anyone can add a message to the bulletin board and all messages are seen by anyone who looks at it This is not the same as email communcation where messages are sent from one person to another and are not seen by anyone else The great advantage of an accumulation of messages is that once a particular matter has been discussed it remains as a record for subsequent users I ll spell it out you only need to answer a given question ONCE This can represent a huge saving of time for staff For historical reasons the bulleting board features of FlyingFish are called the Forum 20 The bulletin board associated with a given part of the task tree is called the Forum for For the pedants among you the plural of Forum
129. u log in as a Student level user the Fora will look quite different The names of most of the other system users will be hidden and you will see only Anonymous This anonymity has proven very helpful in our teaching because we find that students are more willing to ask dumb questions if they have no fear of ridicule from fellow students However it has the disadvantage that some students failing to read the clear warnings that staff read all messages think that they are completely anonymous and can therefore write any sort of rubbish Ah youth A few stern replies soon sort these characters out Students see the names of staff members and they see their own name All other user names are masked Note that students do NOT see links to visit the admin areas of staff and cannot visit these even if they edit the location string FlyingFish is designed for use by students and includes features to correct errors when they occur Students and staff can use HTML tags in their messages BUT what would happen if the following message were posted lt H1 gt Somebody please help me l ve missed all the lectures The user has opened the lt H1 gt HTML tag but has failed to close it Normally this would be a disaster for the remainder of the Forum because all subsequent text until the first lt H1 gt tag if any would be in huge type Actually this might not happen but the results of improperly nested tags are undefined in HTML
130. ues Examples include The deadline for a particular user when a random staggering of dates is desired The current date and time at the server A very elaborate HTML tag which would be awkward to program using insertions and conditional statements In this system release functions are hard coded in the server binaries This means that you can t add new functions and you can t change the ones listed below In some future release it may be possible to plug in additional function modules The syntax for invoking functions is somewhat idiosyncratic Some functions look like UDB variables e g t branch is a function that returns the current branch All such ghost variable functions are in the task tree and should be referred to by absolute reference ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 44 hence the leading slash before branch These ghost variables are supported because they were defined in an early system release and are now widespread In other words although we would like to eliminate them too many users would be upset The modern type of FlyingFish function uses the C C and Java convention of round brackets Functions can be stacked e g t value func1 func2 This means that the value is modified by funcl and then the modified value is modified further by func2 Some functions can be used in several ways e g t ticks is the current tick
131. user with a high level of authority 2 Follow the link to the information page admin You will see information about the admin user account 3 Make sure that the check box Automatically create missing students is checked If you had to change the setting be sure to Submit the form so the change is noted 4 Edit the browser location field by changing it from http 130 95 52 240 8080 jellyfish admin admin to http 130 95 52 240 8080 jellyfish yourID admin where of course you will substitute your preferred user ID for yourID Note that user IDs should only contain ordinary alphanumeric characters avoid the use of punctuation marks and other odd symbols Never use spaces the or symbols or the question mark these might be interpreted as path elements and would cause very strange behaviour indeed 5 If all is well the admin page will change so that most of the fields are blank and you have an opportunity to fill in your details Note that the Authority string should be one of Student Helper Controller Designer or Developer Submit the form That s it Your new user has been created Go to the Login page and try to log in as your new self 5 4 Creating many student records at once A common administrative problem at the start of a new course is to create a user directory for several hundred students at once FlyingFish provides a crude but effective solution to this problem First you
132. ve found a simple technological solution to this common problem to stagger the deadlines by a few days Staggering means that some students have a deadline which is earlier than others The amount of stagger is random so that students are not always first or last To set a stagger value you have to put an info Deadline stagger key in either the user year or task tree This key can be at any level high up as a default value or deep in some course material The stagger key is found using the search pattern u y t just like the info Deadline key Consider a course called Dynamics which has a problem set called Rectilinear We might put files in these locations ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 50 Tree File File contents Explanation y Dynamics info Deadline stagger 3 See below t Dynamics Rectil Deadline Fri 24 Sep Sets the deadline for the inear info 6 00PM Rectilinear problem set We want student deadlines to be randomly staggered by 3 days so that the computer room is not too crowded Set this to 0 or delete it to give all students the same deadline A different stagger value can also appear lower in the tree if you wish it will override the higher value because of the climbing searches u y t Note that the stagger value can be read as the number of consecutive working days where deadlines will occur If Example showing a deadline to the student Th
133. want a problem set that has eight Java style questions followed by several insert the word style that is OK The detail of how to set this up is explained in a later section 3 8 On line editing of HTML If you are logged in as an administrator you should see a small link at the bottom of each web page The link says Edit this file If you click on the link you will see an HTML form containing text which you can edit To submit changes just press the Submit button Note that the edit function is nothing to do with HTML editors that are built into your web browser You can also see a directory of files and directories wherever you are by using the small Directory link at the bottom of each page This release supports a basic file upload tool ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 20 File upload warming Fik Tier n ox Lipa Future versions of the system will support more advanced file management features such as file deletion and duplication For now these tasks must be done at the server computer using the Windows Explorer ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 21 4 Understanding the file structures 4 1 Essential background default files and relative references When you are using your web browser you are continually making requests of remote servers At all times your web browser keeps a URL string that uniquely describes the web page or picture you have asked for t
134. without question 8 2 A Multi choice question is Done An MCO stype question node contains a UDB file called mcq that contains all the information needed to both display and assess the question FlyingFish receives the student s reponse as an HTML form submission and compares it to the contents of the mcq file If the question is correct the Done mechanism is invoked Note that FlyingFish security restrictions prevent the student from viewing the mcq file or any other UDB Note that the different question types do require some custom code at the FlyingFish server It has to be able to take the different input forms and translate them into calls to the Done mechanism or into messages for the student to ADVANCE FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 65 learn from As new question types are developed new server side processing routines will have to be developed to handle the input i e to decide when a problem has been completed If you have a new problem type that you would like to implement discuss it with our technical staff pee Sn FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 66 9 On line adminstrative tools 9 1 Edit this file Suppose you are in the computer lab during a class and a student points out an error in your HTML solution for a problem Normally you would have to make a note about it and fix it later Meanwhile 100 other students are probably viewing the same error and are quietly cursing the course coor
135. xisting sets If you copy a problem directory to your new set the job is mostly done Examples of interesting problem types can be found in Authoring and Dynamics 100 Provide links to the practice and assessed questions in the set1 body html document page 20 Check that you can solve the problems and use the Go to Next function Set up access restrictions so that a student must solve the practice questions BEFORE the assessed question in set1 page 41 Add a Congratulations message to your set1 body html document which only appears if the student has finished the assessed question page 32 section 6 4 16 3 Create a new drag and drop Java problem Sorry this section is not yet ready and I will give out supplementary notes 16 4 Create a new single numerical answer Java problem Sorry this section is not yet ready and I will give out supplementary notes 16 5 Create a completely new type of Java problem Sorry this section is not yet ready and I will give out supplementary notes Poucstion FLYINGFISH TUTORIAL ENVIRONMENT DOCUMENTATION 96 17 Index climb up operator 22 absolute reference 22 CD ROM 59 default file 21 Directory 19 Drag and drop doughnut Java questions 18 Edit this file 19 FishMinder 12 GMT Offset 10 Installing FlyingFish 9 Java applet questions 17 Jellyfish 5 jellyfish ini 58 license 10 Login page 13 multiple choice questions 17 O Reilly WebSite 23 persiste

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