Virtualbox + image for programming classes

[Ditto]

People are still teaching Visual Basic?

And besides, nothing wrong using Visual Basic to teach. My son has used Small Basic at school. For teaching the fundamentals of software engineering, I'm fine with that. Python too, so for year 8, it's good.

Edited February 9, 2020 by Ditto

[mavhc]

Visual Basic was fine until Python came along.

 

What courses are being taught that Visual Studio is required? I do Edexcel's GCSE CS with the default python tools, no need for a VM, type code, press f5, run code.

[mrbios]

What courses are being taught that Visual Studio is required?

 

Y12 and Y13 here use visual studio for part of their course. C++ i think they've been using for the last 5+ years.

[mavhc]

I'm amused that AQA's links to their A Level resources are unfinished and out of date. Why would we trust these people to administer exams when they pay so little attention to detail? Pearson are as bad.

 

Python still has links to Python 2. There's links to VS Express instead of Community, codeplex instead of github, etc etc

 

https://www.aqa.org.uk/resources/computer-science-and-it/as-and-a-level/computer-science-7516-7517/teach/resources-list

 

Meanwhile OCR has a fancy site to organise your lesson plans, picked the first lesson, pdf was from 2015, first link was to a website that doesn't exist now.

[Ditto]

Visual Basic was fine until Python came along.

 

What courses are being taught that Visual Studio is required? I do Edexcel's GCSE CS with the default python tools, no need for a VM, type code, press f5, run code.

Point missed. This is well before GCSE and they are being taught programming concepts, not the language.

[mavhc]

Point missed. This is well before GCSE and they are being taught programming concepts, not the language.

 

What's in Visual Studio that teaches programming concepts?

[junz]

Exactly our user experience in the classroom was terrible, running visual studio and python trying to do high resolution graphics work via programming was extremely difficult and that was on new i5 kit and 8gb ram, sharing this with a running pc the teachers where in despair. The vb image was huge so any changes or new software requirements meant rebuilding an entire suite or pushing out huge packages.

The azure lab gets spun up at the start of a lesson ( can be scheduled ) and it’s ready to go, we have fast virtual machines that can run visual studio with ease. The students can run their code and executables in a safe environment. Teacher can award time credits so they can work outside the lesson or at home.

 

It really has been a revelation, I get what people are saying about the costs, but it’s not just a monetary thing, our support desk don’t need to go fix VB issues and the teacher is managing their own lab, if he wants to add new software he can.

i have been asked to install the software below for a Digital Media course the school is planning to run next year for A Levels and am concerned that we wont be able to run the software on the current PC's we have as we don't have external Graphics cards and Classroom labs sounds like a good solution.

 

3D Blender

Adobe Character Animation

Adobe Audition

Adobe InDesign

Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Premiere Pro

Comic Life 3

Unity

 

 

I did have few questions as follows:

 

• How much does this solution cost per year?
  
• Where is work saved so students can save their work as I assume there is no guarantee students will get the same VM as the were using previously?
  
• What specs are you configuring for the VM's and do you use the Azure labs for programming software as well as Digital media software?
  

[mavhc]

Blender works on modern internal gpus, obviously faster with a more expensive one. But surely the teachers and you should be working together to test out the options and for them to request a budget to upgrade what you have if that's required.

[junz]

Blender works on modern internal gpus, obviously faster with a more expensive one. But surely the teachers and you should be working together to test out the options and for them to request a budget to upgrade what you have if that's required.

 

Its a tricky one as two teachers will be teaching the course to the same set of students and we can only upgrade the gpus in one room so my thinking is we upgrade the room with the newer PC's. The issue is the teacher that "owns that room" does not want to teach thier lessons in the other IT room (when their room is used by the second IT teacher to run the digital graphics course) as the PCs are slower.

[mavhc]

What's the performance like with the current GPUs in the machine? Or are they so old it doesn't run. What performance do they require, are they trying to render 4k 60fps movies? Or just something an internal AMD/Intel GPU can work with? Which is a lot these days

[junz]

The PC's currently have I7 8th gen CPU's with onboard graphics. They are planning to use Blender, Adobe Premiere Pro and Unity in order to fullfill the criteria set out by OCR here and here. Looking at the recommended requirements I belive an external GPU will be needed for a smooth experiance.

[paulkerton]

Its a tricky one as two teachers will be teaching the course to the same set of students and we can only upgrade the gpus in one room so my thinking is we upgrade the room with the newer PC's. The issue is the teacher that "owns that room" does not want to teach thier lessons in the other IT room (when their room is used by the second IT teacher to run the digital graphics course) as the PCs are slower.

 

Then they need to pay to upgrade both rooms then, or they have to suck it up and switch rooms.

[mavhc]

But has anyone actually tested the course on the existing pretty new computers with the current GPUs? No point spending money that's not required. Don't believe, experiment.

[Guest Guest]

We have Photoshop and Premier Pro on our 8th Gen i5s with integrated graphics and I've had no complaints

[flyinghaggis]

We've been using Virtualbox for nearly a decade to run programming/coding apps but our computing staff are starting to push for more flexibility and convenience. The Virtualbox VM we have has no network/internet access and is only able to communicate via a mapped file share to the home area of the local user. We looked at options for tagging the VM traffic with VLAN information/etc to try and route it out directly to the web without granting access to the rest of the network but couldn't find a way to do this? Even if that were possible I think they'd still want more than a Virtualbox image can offer.

 

Most of the coding teaching us now done usingReplit as it's far more convenient. The problem we're finding is there are limitations to the functionality it offers and there are certain situations (exams, contingency) where an offline local app is more suitable. Also, some of the older pupils doing the subject at a more advanced level require access to Python, MySQL and PHP in order to link a web application to a back end datbase. Some also want to carry out more bespoke stuff for project work, etc. So there are instances where Replit isn't an option.

 

I'm still convinced that the future is moving towards some kind of hosted VM whether its in Azure or another platform. I'd be keen to hear if any other schools have moved away from Virtualbox towards a cloud/hosted/online based alternative?

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

I've also replied to the thread here which might be a better place to discuss Virtualbox alternatives to avoid cluttering up this thread?

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/231089-creating-running-exes-computer-science-students.html

[ITGuyNW]

Our school wants a proper python solution as apparently replit does not fulfil the curriculum. I was wondering about the VM route, but I'm still thinking about logistics.

[dmj]

Our school wants a proper python solution as apparently replit does not fulfil the curriculum.

 

Did the teaching staff elaborate on what they need to do? what exam board is it?

[ITGuyNW]

Back to this after a long while...

 

OCR Computer Science

 

CS03 - GCSE Computer Science Resources launch page (ocr.org.uk)

 

 

It's specifically about writing data to a file.

 

[mavhc]

https://sandboxie-plus.com/plus-features/ might be useful

[dmj]

I've never seen a version of python that can't write data to a file. All web implementations fulfill this requirement.

[ITGuyNW]

They just use replit and are wanting proper python to fulfil this.

[dmj]

They just use replit and are wanting proper python to fulfil this.

 

I'm still not quite sure what the requirement is to help with a solution. I'm writing an ai app for a multinational, in python via a web app (jupyter) why isn't this 'proper' python?

[ITGuyNW]

because the OCR requirements are that actual files are read and written to, which unless I'm mistaken, an online IDE cannot do. This is down purely to the requirements of the exam board for this subject. So to do this, you need actual python installing on an actual computer to fulfil the read/write element of the spec.

 

Edited December 15, 2023 by ITGuyNW

[flyinghaggis]

This is down purely to the requirements of the exam board for this subject. So to do this, you need actual python installing on an actual computer to fulfil the read/write element of the spec.

 

It's becoming a real frustration that exam boards keep insisting on requirements which mandate programming/coding apps have to be run on computers rather than using sandboxed/secure or online development environments. IMO we need a way to make representation to these exam boards that allowing pupils to run programming IDE's on school computers is utterly reckless and putting schools in a dangerous position.

Edited December 15, 2023 by flyinghaggis

[dmj]

because the OCR requirements are that actual files are read and written to, which unless I'm mistaken, an online IDE cannot do. This is down purely to the requirements of the exam board for this subject. So to do this, you need actual python installing on an actual computer to fulfil the read/write element of the spec.

 

 

Online ide's absolutely can and do write files to a filesystem. I was using one today and part of the project was to read and write a pandas data frame out as a compressed CSV. Which I did in a jupyter notebook. Jupyter isn't an ide in the technical sense but it is a platform for doing exactly what you are asking afaict.

 

.JupyterHub brings the power of notebooks to groups of users. It gives users access to computational environments and resources without burdening the users with installation and maintenance tasks. Users - including students, researchers, and data scientists - can get their work done in their own workspaces on shared resources which can be managed efficiently by system administrators.

 

JupyterHub runs in the cloud or on your own hardware, and makes it possible to serve a pre-configured data science environment to any user in the world. It is customizable and scalable, and is suitable for small and large teams, academic courses, and large-scale infrastructure.