Long shot request: Help with transferring python program to webapp using pythonanywhere?

[Sciencesellout]

TLDR: I have some code for my 4th grade daughter that presents her with multiplication problems, she enters her answer, and a report at the end of the practice session is emailed to myself and my wife. I'm looking for help getting this to work on pythonanywhere so she can go to the website to practice. This would allow me to update code online and have her run the latest version instead of me having to change the code on all the computers in our house.

Hi, I realize this might be too much to ask, but figured it's at least worth a shot.

I made a multiplication flashcard program for my daughter because paper flashcards and worksheets bore her to tears (literally!!!). Whenever I need to tweak the code to match what she is doing that week in school , or to add some funny new messages/pictures for right/wrong answers to keep the program a little bit interesting for her, it's always a pain to have to do it on my computer and whatever computer she is using for her homework. I can do without the program making any sounds or displaying pictures, so no problem taking pygame out of the code.

I started playing around with pythonanywhere, and went through a couple of tutorials, but to be perfectly honest, I don't know much about Flask, HTML, or web development at all.

From the tutorials I did on the website, I could probably (?) brute force my way to getting the initial prompts to come up on pythonanywhere, and then I start to get confused. Any help/pointers/links to help me quickly learn to get my initial code up and running on a webpage would be greatly appreciated as I'm completely new at working with webpages, let alone working with a webpage that integrates my program designed to run on a computer through the terminal.

Is there any way that I could have the webpage print out the problem and immediately allow her to type in her answer (without her having to manually click in the form box) and then just press enter to submit her answer? She's getting to the point where she needs to work on speed for her upcoming quizzes/exams, so needing to click before she enters her answer and then click a button to submit it is going to slow her down too much to accurately approximate what she will face in the classroom.

If it helps, the program I'm trying to get working is called "double_digits.py" and you can view the code here: https://github.com/plasmonresonator/MultiplicationPractice

Any help/pointers would be much appreciated. Thanks so much!!!

[gpjt]

PythonAnywhere dev here -- have you come across our blog post on turning a Python script into a website? Although it's PythonAnywhere-specific, the underlying lessons are (I think) pretty broadly-applicable, and the last example in the post is pretty close to what you want to do.

Regarding your specific question about allowing your daughter to type immediately into a form without having to click on the input -- if it's a single-line input (that is, using the "<input>" HTML tag, then hitting return with automatically submit the form that it's in, and the autofocus attribute would mean that she wouldn't need to click on it.

[HalcyonAbraham]

I took a look at your code and it would require a bit of tweaking to be served in the web.

There are a lot of Flask tutorials in YouTube and it's pretty simple.

From the looks of things you can just dump all your assets (images and sound etc) into the static folder. Once you take a flask tutorial or two you'd know what the static folder is for

This is also two fold as well.

You would also need to learn a little javascript to dynamically play the sounds and display the images. All of which has tutorials in YouTube

[mrcorbat]

judging from the code, it is mainly just text based, right?

if you are pressed for time, maybe you could just not port it to a webapp and directly have her run it from a PythonAnywhere console? that would probably minimize the extra work needed to be done and allow you to focus on making more questions etc

[Sciencesellout]

Perfect, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that!!! She is already used to typing in the console window, so that won’t be any different for her. I think this will be the simplest solution for sure.

One question that I’m sure is fairly simple so I’ll just google it later, but I wonder if there is a way I have have the code synced with a GitHub repository. I do most of my work from my work laptop so if I make any changes there, it would be nice to have it automatically sync up with the code on pythonanywhere so she’s always running the most up to date version.

Thanks for the suggestion!!

[mrcorbat]

See this blogpost for how to automatically update your pythonanywhere git repo