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🔝 The Exercise Handler 😎

Thinking in terms of long-period work effectiveness and sistainability is the key for productivity.

Having to typeset weekly exercise sheets for a lecture, to provide solutions for them, to keep track of students presence, to prepare the exam at the end of a semester are typical tasks of researchers, who, in parallel, should do their own work. Already to accomplish such a work from scratch is tough, but it can become even worse if the lecturer decide to reuse some old excercises, contained in some wild, compressed directory, which requires courage to be opened. A typical situation may be the following. In a previous semester a dozen of exercise sheets for a lecture have been prepared and handed out, let us optimistically suppose in a very tidy way. Each week a new folder was created, inside which all the material for the exercise sheet was collected. The same for the solutions and for the exam. In the following semester, all the material is given to the following responsible person, who, already to have a look to what was previously done, has to deal manually with many files. If (s)he decides, then, to reuse some exercise, then (s)he has to copy and paste from file to file, taking care, for example, of Latex packages. And what about the sheet layout? In the best case, copy and paste, again. 😮 Just imagine to have to do so for few semesters in a row. 😣 Probably you will wonder about changing job... 😆

This is the main motivation which led to the development of the Exercise Handler. Taking advantage of its functionality, it is possible to work in a standardised way, leaving the material in an ideal shape to start working the following semester. This eliminates completely any overhead due to the reuse of some old exercises and, on top, facilitates the weekly work during the semester.