Importing and exporting data

After creating your experiment, activities, media items, and datasets, you must set up your assignment sets and assignments to begin an experiment. Setting up your assignment sets and assignments is referred to as “importing data”. Due to the diversity of methods for assigning assignments, quizApp does not provide a GUI but does allow a lot of flexibility. Once an experiment has been run, you will want to export your data to analyze responses. The primary way of importing and exporting data is through the /data/manage page. There are two operations you can do on this page: importing and exporting.

Exporting

All data

To export a dump of all data in the database, click on the Export link. Alternatively, you can visit the /data/export page. This will take some time due to the amount of database queries and processing, but it will give you all the data in the database in spreadsheet form. The tab names correspond to the types of objects in the database, and the column headers are in the format <table_name>:<database_column_name>. Each row in every tab represents one database record.

One experiment’s data

To export just the data from one experiment, you can use the /experiments/<id>/results page. There is a link there titled Export to XLSX. Clicking on this link will download a summary of answers to this experiment. Each assignment set will have its own row, and each assignment in that assignment set will have three columns:

  1. A string representation of that activity, e.g. the question text. The contents of this row is a string representation of the result for this activity prepended with the assignment ID - so for example, the header might be the question text and each cell under the header would be a participant’s answer (prepended with the ID of the assignment itself).
  2. Correct/incorrect, with each cell below that being TRUE or FALSE
  3. Number of points awarded for the result

If a participant did not answer a question present in their assignment set, the token _BLANK_ will be present to indicate this.

Importing

To import data into the database, you must modify a script provided with quizApp, namely scripts/generate_import_sheet.py. There are two variables you are going to be interested in, both defined in the beginning of the file:

  1. DEST_FILE: The name of the output file
  2. DATA: A list containing the actual data that should be written to the spreadsheet

DEST_FILE is self explanatory, and DATA has comments above it documenting its format. Note that you must know the IDs of the experiments, activities, and media items you are interested in using. You can find them in the export spreadsheet or in the web interface.

Once you have specified your DATA variable, you can simply run ./generate_import_sheet.py (make sure you are in your quizApp virtual environment). There will be a file in the current directory named based on DEST_FILE, and by uploading this spreadsheet in /data/manage your experiment will be populated with assignments and ready for use.

Note that there is no discovery mechanism for participants to find experiments - the experiment URL must be provided to the participants, which can be found on the experiments settings page.

For a general overview of how the models work, refer to Understanding the QuizApp models. For a detailed documentation of the models and their fields (which correspond to the columns in the spreadsheet), refer to quizApp.models.