This repository contains the content of the ScalaZONE website. It stores both lesson text and course structure. Everyone is welcome to make PRs with suggestions.

Content is distributed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.

• Every commit to the develop branch updates the content in the development environment.
• Every commit to the stage branch updates the content in the staging environment.
• Every commit to the main branch updates the content in the production environment.

Only the production environment is accessible to the public. People outside of VirtusLab and Propensive do not have access to the develop and stage environments, but access will be provided on request.

This is an outline repository fulfilling structure requirements for a course. The following files and directories are required:

• images - directory with images used by course; NOTE that the final path differs from the path within the course repository as follows: /images/<path> -> /api/content/courseImages/<course-id>/<path>
• topics - directory with topics
• advanced.json - course level description
• beginner.json - course level description
• index.json - course description
• intermediate.json - course level description

The branch names correspond to the deployment environments as it is described in the section above.

Courses are the top-level entity in the ScalaZONE material structure. Their structure is stored in the root directory of the course repository. The index.json file stores a list with all available courses. For each course there is a directory named after the course id that contains the course structure. Basic course data is stored in the index.json file in this directory. Here is the Course JSON type structure:

Course levels are parts of the course that are suited for users starting with different ability levels. There are three levels that are possible to add to a course:

• Beginner
• Intermediate
• Advanced

To add a level to a course, it must be present in the levels field in the course's index.json file. Level can be configured using <level>.json file in the course directory, where <level> is either beginner, intermediate or advanced. Here is the Level JSON structure:

And the TopicRange type has the following structure in json:

Topic ranges define what topics and lessons are present in a course level. By specifying this, we are able to use only a slice of a topic for a particular course level. These slices may, however, overlap between level, so that a particular lesson may appear in more than one level.

Topics are ordered collections of lessons. Their index is stored in the topics/index.json file. The structure of a single topic is defined in the index.json file inside the specific directory named after the topic in the topics directory. This index.json file has following JSON structure:

The Lesson JSON type structure:

The LessonPrerequisite JSON type structure:

A lesson's content files are present in the topics directory, within a directory specific to the lesson's topic. The content file must be named after the lesson id and have a .md file extension. This file defines the text and questions that user sees after entering the lesson page. You can use most of the markdown features inside of it, including tables, images and a special syntax for videos.

To embed a video inside a lesson you can use the following syntax:

[![alt text](alt image link)](embeddable video link)

The first part of every lesson's markdown file is the lesson's content: the text that is visible on the lessons page, and is meant to explain a concept specific to this lesson. After this first part, it is possible to include questions testing the user's understanding at the end of the lesson. To do so, first introduce the questions section separator: ?---? and write your questions after it. At this moment there are two types of questions: single answer questions (using radio buttons) and multiple answer questions (using checkboxes). Every question begins with a single-hash markdown header, for example:

# What is 1+1?

It is possible to include code blocks, tables and other markdown elements that are not children of the header element, but they must follow the header element.

After the question text, you must provide the question's answer choices, by specifying an unordered markdown list. It can be defined either using dashes (-) or asterisks (*). However, the character you choose determines the type of the question. Dashes are used for single answer questions and asterisks for multiple answer questions. To indicate whether the answer is correct you should use the markdown checkboxes that follow the list character. Two examples below exemplify this behaviour:

Single answer question:

# What is the result of expression below?

```
2+2
```

 - [ ] 3
 - [X] 4
 - [ ] 7

Multiple answer question:

# What is the result of expression below?

```
2+2
```

 * [ ] 3
 * [X] 4
 * [ ] 7
 * [X] Four

To summarize, let's look on a sample lesson containing some mock content and two questions:

# Arithmetic

## Addition

To add two numbers ...

## Subtraction

...

?---?

# What is the result of the expression, `2+2`?

 - [ ] 3
 - [X] 4
 - [ ] 7

# What is the result of expression below?

```
2+2
```

 * [ ] 3
 * [X] 4
 * [ ] 7
 * [X] Four