Capstone: Introduction to a Tutorial and Prep Work for Showcasing

So for the past fortnight (yep, I just successfully used that word) the Learn2Mine team has been hard at work on creating a tutorial for Learn2Mine - really just a simple 30 minute introduction as to what we aim to have users achieve within our system and effectively giving them a taste of the two different types of lessons we currently offer. So let's break down the steps we had to take in order to prepare for a tutorial (next post will focus on the tutorial itself).

For starters, the tutorial really did not stick out to users first entering the site so a lot of work was done on the frontend of Learn2Mine in order to give it a sleeker feel and make it more intuitive for the less-experienced user. There now exists a splash page for the site where users that are not logged in can actually see just a little bit of what Learn2Mine does, rather than quickly asking users to authorize our program with their Google account. An image of this screen can be viewed below or by navigating directly to the site.

So once users are logged in they are directed to the Learn2Mine home page and it is from here that they can jump into the tutorial. Effectively, there is a button much like the Login button that says "Take the Tutorial!" (no need for a screenshot).

Now the tutorial has to teach the users about the different sides to our software. I have went over this in past posts about how the Virtual Portfolio is where you start, RStudio is where coding, testing, and debugging is performed, and Galaxy is software effectively used for submissions and instant feedback. So the tutorial teaches users about the different components of each of these sides of the software and how to use them.

So now that I have brought up RStudio and Galaxy, I would like to showcase another achievement that the Learn2Mine team has overcome. In the past, we used randomly generated keys to give users a way to link their Learn2Mine account to Galaxy and RStudio. This meant that users used that key to submit software in Galaxy and used that key in order to log in to RStudio. So users really just had to keep copy/pasting it in these different fields (except in Galaxy since it retains a job history if you create a Galaxy account). Obviously this is not preferable. So we went digging through the Galaxy-Dev mailing lists and found that if a user is logged in to a Galaxy account then we can get a handle on their email that they used when signing in to Galaxy. This eliminates the need for users having keys that they kept passing around to the different parts of Learn2Mine. This created a new issue for us, though. Previously, whenever a user submitted their key in to Galaxy, we created a user account on our virtual machine - this is how users were able to authorize in to RStudio. So now we had to create a separate tool that users had to run in order to use RStudio, yet another annoyance. Sherlock Holmes style, more investigative work was done and we were able to put our own code in to Galaxy. This code took the Galaxy signup process and also fired off our addUser.sh script. So now the credentials that a user inputs into Galaxy for that account are the same credentials used for signing in to RStudio, which is a lot better than what we had in the past. What is next to be done is allowing users to change their password because there currently is not an implementation for that. So now users are not perplexed when going to the different parts of Learn2Mine - in the past there was a bit of a curve when figuring it all out. So why did I go off on this tangent? First, it is awesome to get this working. Second, and more importantly, users can seamlessly get involved with solving problems on Learn2Mine, whether in the tutorial or not, more quickly and efficiently.

Music listened to while blogging: Blue Scholars