Talk:Hardcopy Design

What should be the behavior of the hints checkbox for students? Currently the hints checkbox doesn't actually do anything for students. The main question is, should marking the hints checkbox show hints for students only if they have the required number of attempts, or if it should always print hints. The issue is that students working on homework via hardcopy may not get the advantage of the hints of they print their homework before attempting it.

Hints -- technical issue 11/10/2013: In PG there are, for historical reasons, $showHints which contains the number of attempts before a hint can be shown. Another flag, $displayHintsQ, is used to indicate whether the "show hints" check box has been checked.

This is confusing and should be changed in the code, but showHints will have to be changed in a great many places. Even worse in some files outside of PG it appears that $showHints plays the same role $displayHintsQ plays inside of PG. This is not a hard change but will require careful checking.

8/31/2013 Goehle/Gage emails

I'm ok with which ever is easier and safer for the moment.

Let's add some user stories to the user story page on the wiki

Use case for hints/solutions on hard copy

• Student wants to print hard copy for future study
• Instructor or author wants to print hard copy in order to proof read
• Student or instructor prints hard copy for students to show them where they went wrong

So perhaps

Hints will be printed if they are asked for via a check box and they are allowed

• Hints are allowed for an instructor.
• Hints are allowed for students after the answer date.

More thoughts?

Sent from my iPad

On Aug 31, 2013, at 8:13 AM, Geoff Goehle <notifications@github.com> wrote:

In dealing with bug 2707 (instructor's PDF can not omit Solution), the issue was that the always_show_solutions and always_show_hints were working as intended. Mike and I talked about it and decided that the rational behind those settings (that it helps problem writers so they can easily check their work) doesn't really apply to hardcopies.

As a result I changed the behavior of always_show_solutions and always_show_hints so that they are not triggered in TeX mode. This brought up another issue though. The current behavior was that hints are never shown in TeX mode unless it was because of always_show_hints. So now it is impossible to show hints in TeX mode.

There are a couple of fixes for this: 1) Lazy appraoch: remove the hints checkbox from the hardcopy page. It never did anything anyway since the hints were only displayed via "always_show_hints" 2) Controversial Approach: Print the hint if its available and if the user has permissions to see hints. The issue with this is that you have to ignore the number of attempts because its a hard copy. It doens't make as much sense to show the hint "after so many attempts".

Thoughts?