Student Workspace
The Student Workspace is a forked version of VS Code, designed to provide students with an intuitive, helpful, yet distraction-free learning environment.
Layout
The student interface follows a triptych layout, presenting students with three clear columns of content:
Left – Instructions & Tests
- Introduction to lesson content, concepts or features to be employed, and challenges to be undertaken.
- A list of the coding challenges to be completed, each with its name and description.
Centre – Code Editor
- A Monaco editor displaying the exercise files the student is able to edit to interact with course content.
Right – Output
- A terminal for text-based programmes, or
- A browser window when the exercise involves web content (e.g using Flask) or data visualisation.
Features
As we appreciate that some course creators teaching advanced-level students may prefer to have some of these features turned on for their students, we will shortly be adding toggles to the Teachstack course management dashboard that will allow instructors to toggle these features on and off.
Launch the Student Workspace
- Navigate to the Courses page using the sidebar.
- Find the course you would like to edit and click to load the course management dashboard.
- Under the modules tab, select the specific module you would like to preview and click the Preview Module button in the right-hand corner. This will launch the student workspace.
- Alternatively you can navigate to the webpage where you have embeded your course and the student coding workspace will load out within the dimensions defined in the iframe tag.