zyLabs User Guide

You can clone and customize any zyBooks maintained lab in your book. You can change:

• The title
• Instructions
• Template/boilerplate code
• Auto-grading
• Other settings

You can select from more than 50 languages and several standard IDEs including:

• VS Code
• Jupyter Notebook
• IntilliJ
• R Studio

Pair/group programming in zyLabs allows for collaborative learning and project work. Instructors can:

• Set up with any advanced zyLab, including your own custom labs 
• View each student’s contribution and the history of the project.
• Change student groups

Creating a sandbox provides a non-graded space for students to practice coding. Instructors can: 

• Create a non-graded space for students to practice in class or lab 
• Add a piece of template code, or leave the coding space blank.
• Move sandbox spaces to any section of the zyBook.

• Decide if tests will grade student use of case or whitespace.
• Compare exact output or use “starts with”, “ends with”, or “contains” .
• Control which parts of the test students see .
• Write your own regular expression.

zyLabs have an easy-to-use unit test built in, as well as a variety of standard unit test frameworks, including:

• zyLabs have an easy-to-use unit test built in, as well as a variety of statdard unit test frameworks, including:
• J Unit testing
• Python unit testing
• Gtest (Google Test)

• Hide input.
• Hide output.
• Hide all details of the test.

• Create custom feedback.
• Give partial credit.
• Detect and grade more advanced elements of code, such as memory leaks.

Manual grading allows instructors to add or deduct points based on specific criteria. 

• Create cases to add points or deduct points.
• Manual grading shows at the bottom of the student work.

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• See how student code evolves character-by-character.
• Find large paste and delete events. 

• View a dashboard of averages of student behavior metrics.
• Flag outlier students for time, pasted code, and number of submissions.
• Quickly go to student code and see their code history, character by character.

• Detect students with similar code.
• Change the threshold for detection. 
• Export code for your records.

Coding Trails provides a quick visual of student coding efforts without diving deep into their code. Coding Trails shows:

• Time spent on the lab 
• “Explore” runs 
• Each submission for grading 
• Dates and days of the week when work was done 

Collaborate in real-time in the IDE with students

Comment on student work

View student code, character-for-character, including past efforts