Mandalo | Devpost

Logo
Landing page
Submitting an assignment
Evaluating a submission

Inspiration

As our entire team has worked as teaching assistants for the University of Mississippi Computer Science department, we've continuously run into difficulties when trying to grade large batches of student assignments. Our application is a proof-of-concept for an online code submission platform specifically designed for education. "Mandalo" is Spanish for "submitted." We hope to see all the teaching assistants and graduate students using Mandalo before long.

What it does

Our application allows a student to upload and remotely run a program for a given homework assignment. The student can view the output of their program and the expected output. An administrator is able to create new assignments or add languages, although we currently only support Python.

In the backend all the files are hosted in a dedicated git repository, which allows the TA's to execute a remote push which will give them access to all the code. No more ZIP files nightmares!

How we built it

We used a combination of Django and SQLite to serve the web interface, and we used a Docker image to securely run student submissions. The "production version" is hosted on a personal Ubuntu server.

Challenges we ran into

We had the most difficulty with the Django model corrupting itself frequently and with running arbitrary programs in a Docker container.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of successfully capturing output from a program run within a Docker container, as well as our success implementing the application's fundamental workflows.

What we learned

Together we learned how to use Django, SQLite, Bootstrap, and Docker.

What's next for Mandalo

The priority for future work is to add user logins and permissions. We skipped these due to the time we had to spend getting Django and Docker to cooperate and due to that being a thoroughly solved problem. We would also add a more capable system for test cases, so students would not have access to all the answers and could experiment with their own inputs. We also want to support more languages such as Java and C as well as the option to submit multiple languages for the same assignment.

Built With

Submitted to

CrimsonHacks 2017

Created by

I worked with the user interface, aesthetic, and the logo. I learned a lot about docker, but specifically how to use django to set up static headers and footers for pages and a lot about resolving git conflicts.

Claire Hubacek
I provided and configured the web server, and was primarily responsible for integrating Docker into the Django-based application.

Alexander Gunter
I worked on the HTML and styling for the user interface of Mandalo. This was my first project using django and github, so this project helped me develop a better working knowledge of these applications.

Maddie Delcambre
I worked in the server side, built using django and help setup our server connection for the remote secure code execution.

Armando Suarez