This tutorial will explain how you can create a Coding Challenge. Let's pick a simple problem: 

given a string, you want the user to write a program that return its first character

 is input to the program, the program must return 

The only way to automatically evaluate if a submitted piece of code is correct is to see if it works for a variety of inputs. For example, we can input 

 as output. These inputs that are used to check the validity of a program are called 

. So, the main components of a Coding Challenge are:

The video below shows Socratease's interface for exactly this problem

Reading user input (Standard Input) is notoriously hard, especially if one is reading inputs spanning multiple lines. So, most programming platforms, including ours, set up some code that does this reading of input. This lets the user focus on the core logic, and not worry about input/output. For instance, in the video above, you can see that the user doesn't have to do any input/output. They just have to fill a function. In other products, this is called Driver Code. We call it Boilerplate. There are two types of Boilerplates:

Let's continue with our example of extracting the 

. Below, you can see the full code that is stored on Socratease. We are showing the Compiler Boilerplate as well, though the user will not see it in the IDE.

You can clearly see that the Compiler Boilerplate is doing the input and output work. For example, in JS, the 

 function is reading the string as an input. It then calls the 

 function and prints to standard output. The user needn't concern herself with all this. They just need to write the login within the definition of the  

The image below shows how you would enter the Compiler and User Boilerplate when you are creating a Coding Challenge. This 

 has sample code for reading single lines as strings for other languages.

As mentioned earlier, test cases are used to verify if the submitted code is valid or not. There are two types of test cases:

You can see real and sample test cases in the image above.

More complex problems need multiple parameters. It is easiest to split the multiple parameters on different lines. For example, suppose you the problem is to 

find an element in an array, given its index

. The input can then be across three lines:

 in the first line refers to the number of elements in the array. 

 in the next line refers to the zero-indexed array 

 in the last line denotes the index of which we want the value. Obviously, the answer here is 

. Below, you can see how the compiler boilerplate is converting the 3 lines into structured data 

 has sample code for reading multiple lines as strings for other languages.

On creating a new Coding Challenge, you'll see an input field as shown below. If you have the question in a specific format on a public github repo, you can import it directly from there, instead of filling out all the fields.

 has a sample question. You can use a different Github URL, of course. Once you paste this URL into the input field and click on the Fetch button, the question-related fields get auto-populated.  You can see this in action in the gif below.

Adding a Coding Challenge

Adding a Programming Challenge

Socratease CMS

Socratease LMS

Creating a Quiz

Creating a Programming Challenge

Creating a SQL Test

Creating a CSS Test