Getting Started
Welcome to the Next Tech documentation for creating and embedding interactive contents! Contents are created using an interactive What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editor that allows you to view an interface almost identical to what your users will see, and then quickly preview the content to test it as a user.
Contents can be created from the Creator page. First, we recommend creating a course. Even if you don't plan on publishing a course on Next Tech, courses are a useful way to organize content and enables additional functionality.
From the Creator page, you can also rename, move, copy, delete, or launch content. You can also rename or delete courses. Any content in a course that is deleted will be moved to the Ungrouped section.
Once you've created a selected a course, click New Content to get started. You'll be taken to a page that looks like this:
From here you can name your content and select the programming environment you'd like to use (the page will reload when you select a new environment to load a sandbox for that environment).
Once you've selected your environment, click on the 'Instructions' button on the left hand menu to start adding instructions:
From the left hand menu you can add instructions, tests, grading, and configure every part of the interface. A tooltip will be displayed when you hover over each menu item to explain what it is.
To preview your content, click the green "Preview" button in the top menu bar. Your content will update to exactly what the user will see:
If you've already completed part of the content, or want to reset the content to its original state, select the settings icon in the lower left corner:
This will reset instruction progress, grades, test results, Codey messages, file contents, and any other changes to the initial content state.
The blue Files dropdown in the top menu bar allows you to load either the saved starter files or the solution files for the content. Clicking Load Starter replaces the current files shown in the editor with the starter files. Clicking Load Solution replaces the current files with the solution files.
Simply toggle the content back to edit mode by clicking the Edit button to continue working on it.
To save files for the user to start the content with, click the Files dropdown, then click the Save Files button in the top right corner. This will save the current files as the starter files. As such, it is not recommended to use this while previewing your content.
Other content elements (instructions, tests, grading weights, etc.) are saved automatically.
Snapshots are limited to 50MB, so any files/folders that are larger than this must be listed in the Excluded Files Patterns (found in the Settings in the Creator) for the autosaving to work correctly.
Currently, solution files are only used for your convenience while creating content, but we'll be doing more with them in the future.
Anything placed in a /home/nt-user/workspace/.solution directory (so .solution when you first load the editor) is a solution file. When you load the solution files by clicking Load Solution under the file menu in the top right of the editor, the starter files will be replaced with the solution files.
At a high level, this is how the Next Tech content editor works! We have plenty of other articles on how to configure every element of the content, so be sure to check those out as a next step.
