[Suggestion] About Contests, Challenges, Assignments

Question

I've been thinking about Sololearn app's organisation.

Contests, Assignments and Challenges are great ways to learn in addition to the lessons and Q&A.

But I feel there is some confusion in the way it's organised right now:

- The (originally not present) assignment section, named 'Coding Challenges' is reachable through the 'Learn' menu. This feels a little awkward to me.

- This section first received user-submitted short assignments, but many users are complaining about the (long and obscure) delay between submission and publishing. Also, many submissions are rejected while there is no real guide or chart to help users in their assignment creation process. Quite discouraging.

- Recently, the publishing of short assignments stopped and left its place to the much appreciated 'Contests'.

--- My suggestion is simple: ---

There should be a sub-menu at the top of the 'Play' section when entering it, allowing to choose between:
- 'P2P Challenges', this name is just a first idea, it could instead be named 'Quiz Arena' or anything better ...
- 'Coding Challenges' or 'Training Arena' or ... , with easy/medium/hard level sub-sections and a possibility to sort challenges (tags, popularity, views, answers, recent, etc ...)
- 'Contests' (might have sections: web/high level scripting language/low level scripting)
- There was, recently, a tournament idea suggested in Q&A by Jan Štěch, that I think is a big thing, not easy to organise, but if it appears one day, it could also take place in this list.

--- !! To solve the delay situation: !!---

Contests being the 'big events', where points are distributed and winners officially selected, the content-control by Sololearn team makes sense. There could be some improvement on this topic, but I'm sure they are working on it.

... to be continued in the answers.

Answer 1

(Continues here, please, give it a like so that it will stay on top)

But the coding challenges could be left to be published, approved, improved and criticized BY THE COMMUNITY, the creators and mods being able to edit it. This would give some life back to these happy challenges, I'm sure I'm not the only one here to regret the good old time when spontaneous challenges were poping everyday in the Q&A. That is for me a big loss.
The newly created challenges could appear immediately when posted, in a 'pending' section, everybody could discuss them and post codes to answer it, improving ideas, test-cases, and the challenges would become official, only when enough users would have posted answer-codes and liked the challenge, and maybe when moderators or sololearn team would validate them. This would allow to find some clean everlasting challenges for who wants to train his skills, but it would also give back to the community of sololearners the 'live' challenge playground, with fresh challenges, conversations about them, sometimes leading to cooperation, or to new challenge ideas.

Of course, the duplicate challenges would be a problem then, but I'm sure a solution can be found about that. I think there should not be points nor badges given to the creators, or maybe only when their challenges would be validated and that should not be an easy status to reach. Another solution would be for sololearners to be allowed to post a new challenge only after they obtained certain badges.

Something like this : )

I e-mailed this suggestion to SL team.

Answer 2

Faisal
I agree that challenges are also a way to learn (if you read my suggestion I wrote it). But all the app is a learning tool. I'm just saying that challenges would fit better inside the 'Play' section than the 'Learn' one. Recently I've read a question in Q&A, the user was looking for assignments and didn't find it spontaneously.
And about the time it takes to review the submissions, again if you read me : I'm proposing to delegate this task to users, just as it's done in many modern tools like stackoverflow just to give an example ...

Answer 3

I also agree that it's confusing with the assignments in the Learn section. I would put them in the Code Playground. I still think that a SoloLearn user guide would be helpful to find your way around the app...

Answer 4

Wow Cépagrave those are some changes I'm personnally willing to see as I pretty much thought about the same things some time ago. Good thinking!👍👍👏👏
By the way maybe you can also post this as a feedback

Answer 5

Nice point my friend.
Also Sololearn should include challenges related to aptitude .
It would be very helpful to many people.

Answer 6

Cépagrave you're welcome 😆😉

Answer 7

Matthias
I wrote it from the web version, maybe the limitations are different.

Answer 8

I got an answer today by email from SL team. As usual, they are not giving that much informations, but I'm confident they are taking our suggestions into account ... Let's be patient : )

here is the message I got:

Thanks for your feedback.

We continuously improve our features and content, listen to the voice of our community and value every piece of feedback we get. We always love to hear your opinion on how to make SoloLearn a better place for coders!

Best,
Levon
SoloLearn Inc.

Answer 9

Great ideas 👍
I have the feeling that especially new learners are sometimes a bit discouraged publishing quizzes or also by hard challenges.

Also something like a forum instead of Q/A only would ne nice. But maybe difficult to change.

Another point, bit off topic:
How do you manage to write such a huge text here?
I'm limitted to 512 signs when posting a new question here

Answer 10

Coding Challenges are the greatest way to learn, I think it should stay at the "Learn" section but I'm just sad that sololearn doesn't give it much attention.

If you make a Q/A for coding challenges and let users create and take challenges, how on earth could the winner be rewarded after a challenge? because that's the main point of taking a coding challenges.

My Suggestions:

1: Make the weekly CONTEST strictly weekly and not arbitrary.

2: Most importantly, make BADGEs 📛 for winning on coding contests.

Eg:
•Bronze programmer(5 contest wins)
•Silver programmer(10 contest wins)
•Gold programmer(20 contest wins)
•Platinum programmer(50 contest wins)
•Best Competitive programmer(100+ contest wins)

3: Make an improved layout for the Contests and APPEND the winning codes at the end of each one.

4: Don't let the span of a Contest reach next week.

5: Take a closer look at Cépagrave's suggestions.

Answer 11

Thanks Uni, I'll do that : )

Answer 12

I love your ideas .i wish we had more people like you

Answer 13

Cépagrave

Just some thoughts on your post:

The challenge section is currently in the learn section, as you mentioned. As it was previously reserved for only courses and lessons, other coding challenges still help users learn about utilizing different aspects of the languages they use to solve the challenges. Even though it doesn't directly teach them different things, it allows for a way to expand your knowledge on coding and how different languages work, which really is the best way to learn.

I do agree that the time that it takes for the lessons to be reviewed and either declined or accepted is a while, but there is a reason for it. Given that Sololearn has a user base of several thousand people, the number of lessons being submitted is likely incredibly large and expected them to be able to look through and provide feedback for every single one would be unrealistic and nearly impossible. (continued)

Answer 14

Sololearn has reached out to people in the community to help with reviewing some of the lessons, hopefully allowing for the time between lessons getting reviewed to be shortened. They are doing what they can, so the best thing to do would just be to wait and allow for them to get the tools they need to make it as efficient as they can.

For actually writing the lessons, I would suggest looking through some of the lessons in the original courses (e.g. Python, JavaScript, etc.) to be able to get a good understanding on what to base the style of your lesson off of and just branch off from there. Some tips would be to include several notes and code snippets if possible, providing as many examples and detailed explanations on the topic as you can.

The contests, as they are being more popular with Sololearn, are not permanent and will not take over the small challenges. The challenges are very easy to create, only requiring a small explanation and a few examples on how it should look, (continued)

Answer 15

and practicing with them is very important for beginners to coding and can greatly improve one's ability to program and solve different problems. The contests generally provide a much more complex and difficult task to solve, favoring more towards the experienced programmers. This allows for there to be a vast range of difficulties when it comes to the challenges, making that section much more beneficial and useful to the community. I have submitted a challenge, and as it has been declined for having "the wrong title" (as they stated), I think that there is a chance that it will be accepted as they hadn't left anymore notes on it. Nevertheless, I do think that they will continue with the smaller challenges in the future and will provide a mix of both the challenges and contests to accommodate for both the experienced programmers and those still learning.

Answer 16

Cépagrave
As allowing for the community to review the lessons would speed up the process, I think that it would be difficult to implement that into a system that would work for all lessons. This is mainly because Sololearn will take the time to review and edit the lessons, and putting that out to the community would be difficult as it allows for trolls and spammers to take over and possibly ruin most submissions. It would also be difficult to edit as everyone has different ideas on how it should look, and putting it out for them to do so would most likely just result in absolute chaos.

If a system were to be implemented similar to the quizzes for the lessons, I don't really think that it would be of use as nearly any new lesson would be accepted by the community, and only really boils down to their interests and desires for any new lessons. A community driven system could work if it were to be just for filtering the submissions for the surplus that Sololearn has to be reduced, but that could also be abused.

Answer 17

👍🖒

Answer 18

Cépagrave cool

Answer 19

Cépagrave post this to solo learn as suggestion feedback

Answer 20

I'm confused. What was the question again?