code not running

czamiara

A few of my students attempt to run the code that is given to them for the examples and for some of them it does not work. They attempt to do their own code for the prompts they are supposed to and those won't work either and the code they enter is correct. The only workaround I have found is to start over and redo everything which is a big time killer. Is there another option OR what can they do to fix this problem?

adamblake

dashiell-young-saver

czamiara

Hmm this one is kind of hard to debug without knowing what you mean by “won’t” run. Here are a few things to check:

What does it say in the top right for “memory”? Did it go over 100%? If so it might have restarted the kernel. In that case you may see a red “kernel died” or that the memory is around 200mb (that’s what it is near when it restarts, and it should be over 300 once you run library(coursekata)
Do the students possibly have multiple notebooks open? If so those all contribute to the memory allotment and they should close the ones they aren’t working on
Another thing is that if you send me the URL that your students have for the notebook, I can check the logs and try to determine what caused the code to stop running. Sometimes it is a really small error that causes an infinite loop, sometimes out of memory, not sure but I can go in and check!

dashiell-young-saver

@adamblake This sounds like it might be a memory -> kernel died issue, correct? What should folks look out for to see if the kernel has died?

czamiara

Ok, I will look for that next time to see what is happening…..BUT I was going through one of the notebooks myself this evening and it happened to me. I did rerun the "library", the "dat", "exampledat" and "mydat" commands from earlier (notebook 1 while i was in notebook 1) and that seemed to fix the issue. Once I reran those commands, it allowed me to run the commands later down the notebook. Thanks.

dylarm

czamiara You may already know this, but just for posterity: Every time the notebook is reloaded (whether coming back to it or when the kernel dies), every* command box needs to be re-run because the state/data is not saved.

* At least, all of the ones that that particular command box relies upon.

czamiara

dylarm I did not know that. Thank you.

czamiara

I did not know that. Thank you for the heads up.

dashiell-young-saver

czamiara In case it's helpful, here's the part of the intro video that shows students that they need to re-run the notebook top-to-bottom each time they re-open it. Might be helpful to share with your students! Thanks @dylarm!

If you could let us know whether the re-running of the notebook was the primary issue or if there was a deeper memory issue (using the troubleshooting steps from @adamblake) based on your observations from class today, that'd be helpful for us 🙂