The Runestone Server has evolved into a streamlined LMS to support interactive textbooks. The features of the Runestone Server include:
- Serving one or more interactive textbooks
- Creating and Managing a class of students
- Creating Reading Assignments for students
- Creating Problem sets for students
- Grading assignments manually and automatically
- Authoring new questions for the question bank
- Analytics on your students activities
- Checking student progress through the book
- Enabling practice problems for your students based on "spaced repetition"
You are welcome to fork this source and run your own server, but you are also welcome to use the Runestone Server as a free service on Runestone Academy
Installing the Runestone server is a fairly involved process. The complete guide is in the Installation chapter.
The easiest way to deploy or develop Runestone Server is to use Docker, and a Dockerfile is provided for that. You can simply build the container, and run it, providing the database password sourced from an environment variable (or similar). Please see complete instructions in the docker folder included here.
Even better is this video I created That walks you through the process of getting a Docker container up and running on a fresh clean Ubuntu image.
Links to documentation for the project are on runestoneserver.readthedocs.org This includes the list of dependencies you need to install in order to build the books included in the repository, or to set up a complete server environment.
The Runestone Tools are not only good for authoring the textbooks contained in this site, but can also be used for:
- Making your own lecture materials
- Making online quizzes for use in class
- Creating online polls for your course
- See the file CONTRIBUTING.md in this directory
- Get a Github (free) account.
- Make a fork of this project. That will create a repository in your
account for you to have read/write access to. Very nice, complete
instructions for making a fork are here:
https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo - Clone the repository under your account to your local machine.
- Check the issues list, or add your own favorite feature. commit and pull to your fork at will!
- Make a Pull Request. This will notify me that I should look at your changes and merge them into the main repository.
- Repeat!
As our popularity has grown we have server costs. If this system or these books have helped you, please consider making a small donation using any of the Support links at the top of this page.
I have begun a project to document the Runestone Interactive tools
- All of the Runestone Interactive extensions to sphinx:
- Activecode -- Interactive Python in the browser
- Codelens -- Step through code examples and see variables change
- mchoicemf -- multiple choice questions with feedback
- mchoicema -- multiple choice question with multiple answers and multiple feedback
- fillintheblank -- fill in the blank questions with regular expression matching answers
- parsonsproblem -- drag and drop blocks of code to complete a simple programming assignment
- datafile -- create datafiles for activecode
- How to write your own extension for Runestone Interactive
The Runestone server now has a controller to allow users to enter bug reports without needing a Github account. But for this to work you will need to configure settings.github_token in models/1.py
To find instructions on using the Runestone Tools to create your own interactive textbook, see the instructions in the Runestone Components repository.
Note, because this interactive edition makes use of lots of HTML 5 and Javascript I highly recommend either Chrome, or Safari. Firefox 67+ works too. Reportedly Edge works fine as well.
Python 2.7 reached the end of its life on January 1st, 2020. All of our development is now on Python 3.7 and 3.8. With the release of docutils 0.15 sphinx no longer runs on 2.7 unless you install docutils 0.14. Sphinx 2.x only supports Python 3.x. In July 2019 I removed testing for Python 2.7 as it is too much work to try to keep track of dependencies for 2.x and 3.x. Please upgrade to Python 3.
If you use Runestone in your Research or write about it, please reference https://runestone.academy and cite this paper:
@inproceedings{Miller:2012:BPE:2325296.2325335,
author = {Miller, Bradley N. and Ranum, David L.},
title = {Beyond PDF and ePub: Toward an Interactive Textbook},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th ACM Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education},
series = {ITiCSE '12},
year = {2012},
isbn = {978-1-4503-1246-2},
location = {Haifa, Israel},
pages = {150--155},
numpages = {6},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2325296.2325335},
doi = {10.1145/2325296.2325335},
acmid = {2325335},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {cs1, ebook, sphinx},
}