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Assignments and grading

A book can carry graded assignments alongside its chapters. marimo-book does not grade anything itself; it publishes the student version of an assignment notebook as an ordinary page and links it to a grading server such as marimo-grader, where sign-in, submission, autograding, and feedback live.

The current flow

  1. Write the instructor notebook (solutions, hidden tests, marks) in a private repository and publish it to the grader with grader publish. The grader strips the solutions and writes the assignment's identity into the student notebook's PEP 723 block.
  2. Commit the generated student notebook into the book, for example under content/assignments/, and list it as a plain file: entry. mode: static with allow_errors: true is the sensible choice: unfinished answer cells raise by design, and the page is a preview, not an execution environment.
  3. The usual launch buttons do the rest. Open in molab opens the committed student notebook, and the grader widget inside it handles sign-in and submit from the student's browser. Chapters that have an assignment can end with a short pointer to its page.
toc:
  - section: Assignments
    children:
      - file: content/assignments/how-to-submit.md
      - file: content/assignments/glm.py
        title: "Assignment: GLM"
        mode: static
        allow_errors: true

Set GRADER_RENDER=1 in the environment of marimo-book build so the grader's sign-in and submit widgets render as static placeholders on the page instead of live controls that have no kernel behind them.

Republishing an assignment means running grader publish again, copying the new student notebook into the book, and rebuilding. The grader keeps every version, so students who opened an older copy can still submit.

Planned: sync-assignments

A marimo-book sync-assignments command is planned. It will read the grader's public assignment listing for an offering, write the current student notebooks and a small metadata sidecar (title, due date, points, version) into the book, and let the build add an assignment header and grader-served launch links to those pages, so a republish on the grader becomes a rebuild of the book rather than a copy step. Builds stay hermetic: the command writes committed files and build never fetches.

See the DartBrains Assignments section for a live example of the current flow.