There have been a lot of new developments on LNB in recent months. Here’s a quick rundown: 

• Exam Mode: When organizing teams, you can now assign a mission in “exam mode.” In this mode, students can no longer access their reports on LabNBook, except for the one corresponding to the exam. This feature is enabled only during the exam period, which is defined by the report’s work period. In exam mode, this work period cannot exceed 10 hours and must be specified.

• The data processing tool continues to evolve:
  • Column values can be defined using self-referencing sequences based on one (or more) preceding cell(s). For example, the formula for the “col” column can now be “col(-1)+2”. Set the first cell to 0, and you’ll get the sequence: 0;2;4;6…
  • Copy-and-paste operations to Excel are now better supported. Depending on the language selected in LNB, the decimal separators for numbers in the clipboard are either periods or commas.
  • Bar charts are now available.
  • Histograms: They are more customizable; classes are now defined precisely; the data and the class containing it can be copied to the clipboard.
  • New zoom and mouse-panning functions for graphs: click on to enable these functions.
  • The height of graphs is adjustable. This allows you to adjust the X/Y ratio (especially for creating square graphs).
  • Outside their valid range, parameterized functions are now plotted in a light color.
  • You can plot functions in y. And since you asked, here’s a little trick for plotting a vertical line with x-coordinate a: use the function a+y*0 (or a*y/y, or a+y-y, or… let your imagination run wild 😉)
• Regarding the experimental protocols tool, you may be aware that there were still two versions of the tool coexisting on LNB. The old version has just been discontinued. This means that we have converted all the old protocols into the new ones. If you still have any old protocols in your missions, we recommend that you check to make sure nothing was changed during the conversion.
• Peer Evaluation: You can now manually adjust who evaluates whom. This setting is configured (when an assignment includes peer evaluation) from your Reports tab: click on the team you want to edit and click the “Team Options” button.

• And, last but not least, a major project has just been completed: the community assignment-sharing platform (the “LabNBook Hub”). As you know, more and more institutions are setting up their own LNBs. To ensure that teachers can continue to share assignments across these platforms, we’ve set up a shared platform that centralizes the missions. So, if your system administrators have enabled it, you have access to all the missions from the LNB community. For now, it’s still pretty empty; feel free to share your missions. You can do this on the mission editing page, right at the bottom: 

And in the “Missions” tab, you now have access to filters for searching for missions (on your own platform or on the community platform): 

So, as far as we can tell, there won’t be any other new features between now and the start of the school year, since we’ll be focusing our time on finalizing the new version 8 of LNB. This will allow us to upgrade the server’s entire software infrastructure.