Labsheet Overview

The goal of the labsheet package is to enable the easy authoring of interactive web pages for student self-guided learning.

The package works by providing an RMarkdown template for generating HTML hands-on worksheets as utilized in Barry’s Bioinformatics classes at UCSD. This includes in-line R functions for creating student question responses, interactive answer checking, score tracking, and accessory functions for hide/reveal answer display. Extensive CSS style settings are also provided as convenient R functions.

To see an example of labsheet output see labsheet_eg1.html and the corresponding input labsheet_eg1.Rmd. Note that this input file can be generated by following the Getting Started instructions below.

Installation

You can install the development version of labsheet from GitHub with:

devtools::install_github("bioboot/labsheet")

Getting Started

To create an interactive worksheet in RStudio, click File -> New File… -> RMarkdown and in the dialog box that appears, select From Template and choose Hands-on Q/A Web Exercises (labsheet).

This will result in a new RMarkdown document being generated with example code and text demonstrating major features. Save and Knit the file to HTML to see how it works.

Alternatively (or if you’re not using RStudio) use:
rmarkdown::draft("exercises.Rmd", "labsheet", "labsheet")

Related resources

Functions and features of the labsheet package are based on on ideas from Software Carpentry lessons and the learnr package.

Although labsheet currently has fewer features than RStudio’s learnr package, it is more lightweight: whereas learnr tutorials must be either hosted on a shiny server or run locally through an R/shiny process, labsheet creates single standalone HTML files that require only a JavaScript-enabled web browser. This means they will work well on any web host including GitHub pages. The output HTML files can also be sent directly to students and opened on their own computers, tablets or chromebooks. labsheet is also much more simple to use.

Available interactive widgets

The labsheet package provides functions that create HTML widgets, CSS styling, or common text snippets by using inline R code. These functions include:

function	widget	description
fitb()	text box	fill-in-the-blank question
mcq()	pull-down menu	multiple choice question
torf()	pull-down menu	TRUE or FALSE question
hide() and unhide()	button	solution revealed when clicked
question_start()	css	style question block
question_end()	css	style question block
author()	html text	author and date text
score_counter()	floating text	floating score counter
total_correct()	html text	total count of correct answers

All package functions:

library(labsheet)
ls("package:labsheet")
#>  [1] "author"           "fitb"             "hide"            
#>  [4] "labsheet_default" "mcq"              "question_end"    
#>  [7] "question_start"   "round2"           "score_counter"   
#> [10] "strip_lzero"      "style_widgets"    "torf"            
#> [13] "total_correct"    "unhide"

The appearance of the question/answer text box and pull-down menu widgets changes when users enter the correct answer. Answers can be either static or dynamic (i.e., specified using R code). Running scores and counting of correct answer responses is provided by either score_counter() or total_correct(). Currently only one of these functions can be used in a given document and counters will be reset upon page refresh.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.