representers.md

Representers

A representer is a piece of software that takes a student's solution and returning a normalized representation of it. We then use these representations to streamline automated feedback and classification.

An example helps to explain representers best. Let's presume two students submit two submissions to the hello-world exercise in Ruby:

# Student 1's submission
def self.hello(name = 'World')
  "Hello, #{name}!"
end

# Student 2's submission
def self.hello(nom = 'World')
  "Hello, #{nom}!"
end

Although the code to these solutions is different (different indentation, variable names, and string syntax), they are essentially the same. So by creating a normalized representation of them, we can treat them as the same for the purposes of providing feedback. This dramatically reduces the amount of duplicate mentoring that needs to happen.

Each track maintains its own representer, specific to that language. There is no standardized output - we only require a track to be internally consistent.

Building a Representer

If you are interested in building a Representer, checkout out the Representer documentation for more information.