CubeIDE & MX in MacOS "assessment mode" - for exam use ?

[phm]

Split from Open-source educational IDE for STM32 – feedback from STM32 users (by @Moussa1492)  for better visibility of this different question

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MacOS has an "assessment mode" which blocks any other apps from running.  

What I need is the CubeIDE and MX that activate this mode, so an exam without using AI would test actual understanding.  

Is this available?

[mattias norlander]

Thanks @Pavel A.  for pinging me. 

Interesting topic. I had no clue that MacOS had an "assessment mode".

@phm, are all your students on MacOS? Your institute provides the students with Apple machines? Or how do you deal with exams on Windows and Linux? When I visit universities I tend to see a mix of the 3x OSes...

Let's provide a bit user statistics on the Cube ecosystem... The Cube tool ecosystem consist of roughly 5% MacOS users, 10% Linux users and 85% Windows users. If we zoom in on the user group representing students, the MacOS user base might be a bit higher...

While I like the request I think we need to guage the interest from other institutes to see if this makese sense or not? I encourage other institutes to share their view.

Then I have some technical doubts...

• IDEs: I doubt that we can support macOS assessment mode in CubeIDE (Eclipse and VS Code) without native up-stream support in each of these frameworks.
  • Do you confirm that VS Code and Eclipse ("vanilla" = without our extensions/plug-ins) works well in Assessment mode?
  • If not, the first step needs to be to file an up-stream ticket to these communities...
• MX: You mention an internal Write permission blocking MX from being possible to operate in a sandboxed assessment mode...
  • My fear would be that the issue you have uncovered is just the first issue amongst many others. We don't know how "deep the rabbit hole is"? I assume that the process stopped at the first error, hiding any other issues. Correct?

Just my thoughts on the topic.
So.. to conclude, there are multiple things to consider in this request: 

• Does the size of the user base justify giving this request priority?
  • I invite more community members to convince us, your voice should drive our prios! :)
• ST may not be fully in control of enabling "assessment mode", we may depend on the willingness from  open-source tool projects that we depend on.
• And "how deep is the rabbit hole?"

[phm]

Thanks for your reply.

It's true that the original question was about MacOS assessment mode, which is not relevant to Win 11 users.

I'd like to redirect your attention.  The objective is to find a way to test students' understanding in the "age of AI".  Today they can type their questions into the web search prompt and get direct answers and even code to make the project work.  My plan is, on W11 and MacOS, they blink the LED (for example) with every use of AI, then I'm looking for a way to use the development tools to perform the same lab again but in an AI-less environment, to test their understanding.

To do that, they create a clean non-administrator account on their computer which doesn't have access to the lab they just did.  This is where the problem comes in for the MacOS - CubeMX is asking for write access on the application files.  Can ST please not do that?  Seems like it's not necessary, should be an easy change to the code.  W11 doesn't seem to have this problem, perhaps all accounts have write access to the application files.

(For this to be practical for 40+ students, they cannot re-download the big packages, it takes too long.  I'd also like to turn off the WiFi and limit applications that can run to just the MX and IDE, so some work-arounds aren't effective.  Most students here use MacOS, which may not be a high percentage of users globally, neither is the 32L4R5 we use, but both still need ST support.)

I encourage ST to support education of the STM32 chipset in the new "age of AI" or we could end up with new engineers whose only option is to use AI to complete their projects without understanding how the chipset works.

Thanks.