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. To create a new course, click the + New Course button shown below:
Once you've created 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 using the textbox in the top menu bar. You can also decide the type of content using the drop-down list. Visit Content Types for more information on which type to choose. Next, 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, tasks, 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 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, toggle the content back to edit mode by clicking the Edit button in the top menu bar. From there navigate to the Toolbox button, as shown below:
In the Toolbox, scroll down and click the Reset Content button. Once clicked you will see the following pop-up:
This will reset instruction progress, grades, test results, Codey messages, file contents, and any other changes to the initial content state.
You can add starter files one of two ways. The first way to add starter files is by using the directory sidebar, as shown below:
The other way to add files is by syncing your files from GitHub. To do this, please see the Linking GitHub Files from the Using GitHub page.
To save files for the user to start the content with click the Save button in the top right corner. This will save the current files and tabs. 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 the starter files will be replaced with the solution files. To load the solution files, click the Toolbox button as shown below:
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.
