Frequently Asked Questions

How can I help my students recognize subproof boundaries better?

Carnap has a few options for indicating subproof boundaries. The two main methods are to either render the proof separately from the input, or to overlay indentation indicators that correspond to subproof boundaries.

The rendering option looks like this (details depending on the system):

Playground
Show Q->P Q :AS P :PR :CD 3

and the overlay option looks like this (details depending on the system):

Playground
P :AS P/\P :&I 1 1 P :&E 2 P->P :->I 1-3

You can find details about overlaying indentation guides here, and details about the rendering option here.

How can I encourage my students to slow down and think when writing derivations?

This is a good question. One option to discourage students from typing before they think is to slow down the rate at which they get feedback. You can require a button-press for feedback on a proof, or turn off feedback about correctness entirely by using the settings feedback="manual" or feedback="syntaxonly" respectively. Here's the link for more details on the feedback settings.

How can I use Carnap to give students an exam?

If you're using Carnap, an exam is an assignment just like any other assignment. But depending on the type of format you want your exam to have, you may want to set some options on that assignment.

If you'd like your students to be able to submit incorrect answers, rather than having Carnap warn them when something is wrong, then you can add exam to the options attribute of your exercises, writing them something like this:

~~~{.ProofChecker options="fonts exam" } 
1.1 :|-: P->P
~~~

All the exercise types except for the syntax-checker support the exam option; you can also set other options to disable checking or allow only certain types of feedback on the unsubmitted work. Check the documentation for individual exercise types to get the details on how to do that.

If your students are allowed to submit incorrect answers, you might want to review them and assign partial credit. You can do that using the review area that's associated with each assignment. There are also a few assignment settings that might also be helpful for an exam. In particular,

  1. you can set a timer, so that exam needs to be completed in a certain number of minutes after its opened, and

  2. you can set a "release date" for grades, so that students can only view grades after everyone has completed the exam.

Details on the review area, and assignment settings, can be found here: here.

You may also want to know how reset the exam timer for certain students, or how to offer accessibility accommodations for certain students. Information on how to do that can be found here

How can I adjust deadlines for assignments?

There are two major deadlines associated with an assignment. One is the due date. This is displayed on each student's user page, and determines whether work counts as late. The other is the visible date. After the visible date passes, the assignment is no longer visible to the student, and can't be accessed. You can configure both of these dates by pressing the small "gear" icon that appears next to the assignment listing in the "manage assignments" tab on the instructor page.

You can also adjust deadlines per-student in two ways. One is to offer the student an extension. You can do this by clicking the "calendar plus" icon that appears next to the student's name in the class roster on your instructor page. The extension will override both the due-date and the visibility date for that student. You can also set a deadline adjustment policy for a specific student by clicking the "clock" icon next to the student's name.

How can I control student credit for late assignments?

By default, students receive half-credit (rounding down) for problems that are submitted after the due date, but while the problem is still visible. However, late credit is configurable using the late-credit option, which applies to all exercises. You can set the late-credit option like this:

~~~{.SomeProblemType late-credit=4} 
1.1 SOME PROBLEM
~~~
How can I control when grades are released?

Ordinarily, a student's score for a problem is visible (on the student's user page) immediately after the student submits a problem. In some situations (for example, during an exam), this can be undesirable.

If you want to release grades only after a certain time and date, then you can set a "Release Grades After" time when you create the assignment. You can also update this release time by pressing the "gear" icon next to the assignment on your instructor page, in the "manage assignments" tab.

How can I embed a video in an assignment?

Carnap's markdown dialect supports raw HTML, so you can embed videos by including them in the same way that you might include them in an ordinary webpage. There are two main options.

If your video is a file (a .mp4, mov, avi file or something similar) that you have uploaded to a file hosting service somewhere, then you can point a video tag at it by including something like this in your pandoc document:

<video controls
    src="https://archive.org/download/day_the_earth_stood_still/day_the_earth_stood_still_512kb.mp4"
    width="560"></video>

Which will produce something like this (in browsers that support embedded videos):

More details on how to use <video> tags can be found here.

Note: Please don't upload video files to the Carnap site. We're not designed to serve these. Video files will need to be hosted elsewhere.

If your video hosted at a site like youtube or vimeo, rather than at a file hosting service, then you can instead use an "embed code". Instructions for obtaining an embed code for each of these services can be found here: for youtube, and for vimeo

The embed code, when you get it, should look a bit like this:

<iframe width="560" height="315"
    src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nfeWlHVyBZQ" frameborder="0"
    allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media;
    gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

And should result in something like this


Want to offer a documentation suggestion or report a typo? Use the issue tracker here!

Or, if you just have a quick question that's not addressed above, feel free to send an email to gleachkr@ksu.edu—if your question comes up a lot, we'll add it to the FAQ.