Suraj Rampure, Christopher Pyles Otter Grader: A Lightweight Solution for Creating and Grading Jup

Otter-Grader is a lightweight open-source command-line tool for developing and grading Jupyter Notebook assignments at scale. It enables instructors to produce an assignment and its autograder from just a single notebook. Otter was developed by Christopher Pyles, while working with Data Science Undergraduate Studies at UC Berkeley. Since its pilot in 2020, Otter has been adopted by instructors at a wide variety of institutions, from a university in Japan to a high school in North Carolina, and has been deployed in courses with enrollments ranging from 15 to 1500+. Attendees will find our talk particularly useful if they’ve created notebooks for educational purposes, and/or if they’ve worked with grading infrastructure such as nbgrader or Gradescope. Part 1: Authoring Assignments We’ll start by demonstrating how to author assignment notebooks in Python using Otter. One of the reasons Otter is so convenient is that an entire assignment and autograder can be developed in just a single “source” notebook. That notebook consists of exposition, solution code that students need to produce, inline autograder tests, and other metadata. After creating a source notebook, a single use of the otter assign command-line tool produces a student-facing version of the notebook. In this notebook, students only see the skeleton code their instructor wants them to start with (rather than the solution), and instead of seeing the nitty-gritty details of all autograder tests, they only see calls to the function grader.check, which displays the test cases that their code for a given question failed. Part 2: Releasing and Collecting Assignments In addition to creating a student-facing assignment notebook, otter assign also generates a portable autograder.zip file that instructors can run to compute grades. This autograder can be run anywhere that pip install otter-grader can be run – most commonly, this is in a Docker container on a personal computer or on Gradescope, a popular LMS. We