FAQ: Exercises and reading activities

• What is a draft activity? teacher
• How do I create new exercises? teacher
• How do I mark a reading activity as read? student
• What do the statuses next to activities mean? student

What is a draft activity? teacher

A draft is an exercise or reading activity that has not been published yet. Draft activities are never visible to students and are used to create and test activities before they are published. When you add a new exercise to Dodona, it will automatically be in draft mode until you publish it.

On the home page of Dodona, you can find all your drafts under Draft exercises. This gives you an overview of all the activities you are still working on. Once the exercise is ready, you can publish it: navigate to the activity and click the Publish activity link in the warning banner at the top of the page. This link only appears once the activity is ready for publication: it must have a valid configuration file, a name, a description and a programming language, and (for exercises) you must have submitted at least one correct solution.

How do I create new exercises? teacher

As a teacher, you can use the hundreds of exercises that are available in Dodona, but you can also create new exercises yourself. You can follow this guide for this.

How do I mark a reading activity as read? student

A reading activity is a page with learning material that you read, rather than an exercise you submit solutions for. To let Dodona (and your teacher) know that you have finished it, click the Mark as read button at the bottom of the page. The button is then replaced by a confirmation showing when you read the activity, and the activity gets the status Read in the activity list of the series.

If the series has a deadline, marking a reading activity as read before the deadline counts in the same way as submitting a correct solution to an exercise before the deadline.

What do the statuses next to activities mean? student

The status next to each activity in a series shows your progress:

• For an exercise, the status reflects your most recent submission: Correct, Wrong, or Not yet solved if you haven't submitted anything yet.
• For a reading activity, the status is Read or Not yet read.

Once the deadline of a series has passed, the icon in front of each activity shows whether you met the deadline: only solutions submitted (or reading activities marked as read) before the deadline count.