“Discovery prompts” is a package I put together to build non-graded interactive lab notebooks as web pages. Formerly, students were turning in Google docs that responded to questions from a static web page, and one of the problems is that they wouldn’t always recognize when they were confused about things, so instead of asking a question during lab, the only way to help correct their thinking would be for me to pore through the lab notebooks carefully and give detailed feedback, something that wasn’t realistic time-wise given the number of students per section.
This delayed feedback would also be much worse than in-the-moment corrections, since it would likely take at least a week to get stuff back to them, by which point the class had moved on to other topics and their misconceptions would probably already have done more damage to their understanding of things.
So I implemented lab web pages that had questions embedded in them where you can press a button to check your answer. In some cases there’s a single correct answer and it will mark you right/wrong, in all cases there’s at least an “example answer” that you can compare to your own. All questions have unlimited attempts and have a button to show the correct/example answer; this is not an assessment tool.
The notebooks are constructed using pandoc (a command-line document-conversion tool) with my own custom plugin, allowing me to take custom Markdown syntax for questions and convert it to interactive elements when spitting out HTML. I write the notebooks in Markdown and include special syntax for each question, then I use pandoc on the command line to convert them to HTML, and then upload the resulting HTML pages to a server where students can view them. There’s no backend or other process that needs to be kept running constantly to serve things, because the student answers are not being kept track of or recorded, except on their own computers.
You can download this zip file that contains the pandoc plugin along with an example of markdown source and HTML output. You’ll need to download pandoc yourself, if you’ve set up a package manager for your operating system it should be available there.
If you just want to see what it looks like, here’s the example HTML file that describes what it’s capable of, and here’s the markdown source.