Project: TAskmaster

TAskmaster is a desktop app for managing students, optimised for use via a Command Line Interface (CLI) while still having the benefits of a Graphical User Interface (GUI). If you are a CS Teaching Assistant who can type fast, TAskmaster can help you track your students’ attendance and class participation faster than traditional GUI apps.

TAskmaster helps a TA to keep track of the students they are currently teaching. It records identification details such as name and NUSNET ID, as well as contact details, like telegram handle and email. TAskmaster also helps a TA to track students’ attendance for a lesson. A TA can also use TAskmaster to find students that are present at the lesson to call on to answer questions, and award class participation score correspondingly.

Given below are my contributions to the project.

  • New Feature: Designed and implemented the student record and record list contained in a session.
    • What it does: Allows a TA to have a dynamic record of students who are enrolled in a particular session that updates when certain changes are made, such as marking a student’s attendance or awarding class participation score. Each record contains the name and NUSNET ID of the represented student, their attendance and class participation score.
      Important: the student record list in each session is independent of the student list.
    • Justification: This feature is essential to the product as a TA should be able to see and change certain details of the student records in a session setting, without modifying the student list separately maintained by TAskmaster.
    • Highlights: This enhancement requires the implementation of an immutable StudentRecord class and a StudentRecordList as a data structure that supports the controlled addition and editing of student records. This was challenging as it required an in-depth analysis of design alternatives (discussion found in the developer guide) to how the StudentRecord and StudentRecordList classes should be implemented.
    • Credits: Design inspired by UniquePersonList in AB3.
  • New Feature: Added the ability to mark a student’s attendance, or all students’ attendances at once, in a particular session.
    • What it does: Allows a TA to track who is present at the session and who is absent.
    • Justification: This feature enables the TA to mark class attendance efficiently and quickly move on with the lesson proper. TAskmaster will save the attendance records for the TA to view at his leisure after the class has ended, saving the TA from having to juggle between physical or slower digital means of taking attendance and teaching the class.
    • Highlights: This enhancement requires some contemplation to be made on the implementation of the mark attendance method. This was challenging as it required an in-depth analysis and consideration on how to reconcile the different ways that the command vs the method identifies which record is supposed to be marked.
  • New Feature: Added the ability to list all student records in a session.
    • What it does: Allows a TA to view the records of all students enrolled in that session.
    • Justification: Since TAskmaster has some functionality to filter the student record list, this feature enables the TA to “reset” the list and view all the records.

  • Code contributed: RepoSense link

  • Project Management:
    • Managed releases v1.2 - v1.3 (2 releases) on GitHub.
    • Authored, tracked and closed issues on Github.
  • Enhancements to existing features:
    • Fixed many bugs found during PE-D and developer testing of TAskmaster. (PR #213, #217, #226, #232, #239, #240)
    • Improved the GUI in v1.4 by fixing some bugs related to resizing of the application window, and changing the look of various visual components. (PR #170)
    • Redesigned Attendance and related classes to StudentRecord. (PR #77)
    • Refactor names to update AB3 code to TAskmaster code. (PR #43)
  • Documentation:
    • User Guide:
      • Added a walkthrough section to give new users something to follow so that they can better understand how to use TAskmaster. (PR #202, #241)
      • Added documentation for the mark and mark all features.
      • Updated User Guide to resolve several documentation flaws pointed out during PE-D (PR #166, #213)
    • Developer Guide:
      • Added implementation details for StudentRecord and StudentRecordList, including: (PR #79, #199)
  • Community: