We introduce Ribbon a wrapper around Moodle’s GIFT format, which enables instructors to compose a quiz in a Markdown document, with questions that have multiple versions. The tool accepts templated questions with placeholder strings in the body of the question and a list of multiple values, or a function/routine that generates a list of values. The output is a GIFT file containing a question for each variation of the list. This reduces the amount of time needed to create a high quality exam while minimizing students' incentive for copying each other.

A presentation explaining the project is available here.

The only dependency of the Ribbon module is Python 3. All imported packages should be installed in a clean, new Python 3 installation.

Usage information and help is include within the script. Issue

python3 ribbon.py --help

for command line options and documentation.

Using the csv comment block, you can generate a question template, where the variables will be substituted by Ribbon to generate the final GIFT questions. Each template can have a header name, which identifies the hierarchy in the moodle question bank. The example

 # exam/text/substitution
 <!-- csv
 form           , word       , answer
 past tense     , run        , ran
 plural         , mouse      , mice
 scientific term, yawning    , oscitancy
 Latin term     , unconquered, invicta
 -->
 The {{form}} of {{word}} is { ={{answer}} }

will generate 4 questions based on the template, with names Q001, ..., Q004 under exam/text/substitution path in moodle question bank.

• Initial commit
• Beta option: Coderunner questions

Design and development:
Frank Blanning¹, Dimitris Floros¹, Nikos Pitsianis¹.

Communication:
Send your questions at {frankgou, fcdimitr} @auth.gr
or open a new issue.

Acknowledgements:
We thank Xiaobai Sun² for her critical comments.

¹ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
² Department of Computer Science, Duke University, Durham, NC USA