Savvy Student Stats 😎

Contents

Contents

• Awesome School Stats 😎 (school-stats-powerbi)
  • Contents
  • Intro
  • HOWTO Obtain Security Key for Moodle
  • History
    • TL;DR (somewhat)
  • More History

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Intro

Using the Moodle web service, this package extracts Course and Grade info to feed into Power BI for pretty reports and AI insights!

Hope it helps someone. If not, I at least have a copy of the repo for my own purposes. Since my son's education is the most important thing, after managing Type-1 Diabetes, is school. It is learning how to learn, develop ing productive habits, and handling feedback. It determines the future.

"Knowledge is power" --- Sir Francis Bacon (or Thomas Jefferson, apparently there's flame wars)

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HOWTO Obtain Security Key for Moodle

1. Login to Moodle as the Student.
2. Click the name/avatar at the top right.
3. Click Preferences.
4. Click Security keys.
5. Should end up on a URL ending with something like /user/managetoken.php?sesskey=YOUR_SESSION_ID_THAT_DOES_NOT_MATTER.

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History

TL;DR (somewhat)

This started as a summary but turned into the full description. Hope it's useful.

My 13 year old son ("Bob") switched to online school to finish Grade 6 in 2020. We decided to stay in online school for Grade 7. Tried using Notion and other management techniques to track assignments. Process was tedious and manual. Wound up in a two week sprint of getting things together during Jan/Feb 2021.

During this, as a parent, I wanted to see what assignments had not been handed in, and what subjects my son was doing the best/worst in.

I just started using Cypress for automated browser testing and saw a chance to play with it, push it outside the usual testing use case and turn it into a web scraper.

I had access to the "My Mentees" grade report through the school's online learning management system (LMS), which for Grade 6 was Google Classroom, and for Grade 7 (Bob's current grade) the school used Moodle.

Moodle feels older, more limited, than Google Classroom. I never got as deep into stats, analytics, devops, etc.. when he was using Google Classroom.

So I wrote some Cypress tests that would:

1. Login to Moodle
2. Visit the My Mentee Grades Report
3. Scrape the assignment feedback from the report.

The problems I found were:

1. Only some assignments were listed
   1. Teachers can hide assignments.
   2. I think that some assignments are auto-hidden after a certain time.
   3. I believe from past conversations that teachers like to keep the report page clean, for both the Student and the Mentor (Parent).
   4. Different subjects have different report pages.
      1. Later found out that is because Moodle has a "Grading Book" which seems to be configured per Course (subject)
         1. Is "subject" a local term? I'm from Calgary, Alberta, Canada 🍁.
   5. Final nail in the coffin was that I couldn't extract any date for assignments.
      1. No idea what was sold and new.

More History

As a parent of an Online Grade 7 Jr. High Student in Canada, I am helping my son daily, hourly, and sometimes every 10 minutes-ish, to help him:

• Decide what to focus on, well learning how to manage himself
• Review school assignments
• Learn the subject matter in detail
• Study for quizes
• Manage Assignments
• Using a Kanban Board in Notion
• Follow-up on submitted assignments
  • Check for Feedback (grade and comments)
  • Reply to any actionable feedback
    • Common feedback at the beginning of the year was that a file would not be attached properly (sometimes due to confusing language on the submission page), or a few questions would be overlooked that needed responses added.
• Reflect on Feedback
  • What was awesome?
  • What can be done better?
  • How difficult was it?
  • Is the grade going to achieve goals for the Reporting Period, week, month, etc.

After close to six months online finishing Grade 6,(Feb-July 2020), when COVID-19 became a global pandemic, me, my son, and his mom, decided to enroll in online school for Grade 7 (Sep-July 2020/2021).

There were numerous benefis to online scool, including:

1. FAR less sick days.
   • By far the number one benefit to us is that as a child with Type-1 Diabetes, a common cold easily becomes a major infection, knocking him out for a few days, or a week at a time.
   • There were over 20 sick days in Grade 6, and countless days not feeling well but still attending.

TODO: Finish

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Installation Usage Contributing Credits License

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Made with ❤️ by sqrl (Dad) and Bobthebe3t (Child/Student).

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