Hints for practice exercises?

[colinleach]

Background on the forum.

We haven't generally included docs/hints.md for Practice exercises, though all our Concept exercises have them. As of today, only fft has hints, and baffling birthdays is about to become the second when the PR is merged.

I compared a few other tracks, to see how many they have (not many):

• Python 7
• JS none
• C# 1
• Elixir 6
• Java 2

I'm inclined to include them for new exercises, when the stumbling blocks are fresh in our mind. Adding them to 82 older exercises is more than I want to sign up for!

If we had some priorities for exercises that repeatedly trip up students, we could add Hints very much more easily than adding Approaches. I don't know who (if anyone!) does mentoring on the Julia track. They would probably have good suggestions, if we can find them.

The build status page lists mentoring requests per exercise. That may be a useful clue, pointing us towards rotational-cipher, secret-handshake, clock.

[depial]

I agree that it seems to be to daunting a task to write hints for every practice exercise, and I also agree it would be good to provide them for any new exercises.

Another potential clue is the completion rate, although it's hard to tell the difference between exercise difficulty and student indifference.

On that note, it's interesting to see how much higher the completion rate is for concept exercises. So the syllabus seems to attract more motivated students and/or inspires more determination in them.