MyBelts

The French education system is currently working on evaluating students by skills instead of grades (pages in French). It means that teachers have to evaluate their students individually on specific skills within the subject they teach. For instance, a math teacher will have to evaluate the level of proficiency of each student with performing calculation, handling sizes and measures, using digital tools, following a rigorous reasoning, and so on.

To adapt the method to students of various levels, evaluations should be customized for each student, depending on how far they have progressed with a skill. However, tracking this, printing the evaluations and distributing them can take a significant amount of time.

This is why I have created MyBelts, a web application that lets teachers manage their class for this purpose. They can register students for the next evaluation in any given skill, and students can also register themselves. When a teacher wants to make their student take an evaluation, they can click on a single button that generates a single PDF with the appropriate evaluation sheets for each student, and their names prefilled. Once the evaluation is done, they can easily check in which students passed and which did not. This way, the application will know what evaluation they need to pass next time.

Installing

Dependencies

sudo apt install libpq-dev inkscape pdftk texlive-extra-utils texlive-latex-recommended

libpq-dev is required for the back-end to talk to the PostgreSQL database. The other dependencies are needed for the exam generation feature; everything else should work fine without these dependencies.

Back-end

install Python 3.9 or later (sudo apt install python3)
move to the back-end directory (cd back)
create a virtual environment (python3 -m venv env)
activate the virtual environment (source env/bin/activate)
install the Python packages (pip install -r requirements.txt)

Front-end

install Node and npm
move to the front-end directory (cd front)
install the npm packages (npm install)

PostgreSQL

install PostgreSQL (sudo apt install postgresql)
create a database mybelts with a user mybelts using password mybelts
activate the virtual environment (source env/bin/activate)
create tables in the database (alembic upgrade head)
populate the tables (./test-api)

Other Dependencies

sudo apt install inkscape pdftk texlive-extra-utils texlive-latex-recommended

Running

start the system services (sudo systemctl start postgresql)
move to the back-end directory (cd back)
activate the Python virtual environment (source env/bin/activate)
start the back-end (FLASK_DEBUG=1 flask run)
open another terminal, in the front-end directory (cd front)
start the front (npm start)
login as root with password root

Testing

cd back
flake8 .
mypy .
./test-api
cd ../front
npx eslint src/*tsx

Developing

Updating TypeScript Models for the API

Assuming the API is listening locally on port 80, just run cd front && ./refresh-api-schema.

qsantos / mybelts