Why are my interactive steps not being marked?

Some courses, like Python for Beginners, have interactive steps in the instructions to help guide you to the correct answer. Sometimes, you may notice that not all of those steps are being checked off, even when the Grok marker says you have completed a problem. What's going on?

Unlike the Grok marker, which marks the output of your code, the interactive steps can sometimes check the code that you have written in the editor. Small details in your code may affect whether an interactive step is checked, such as:

• Using single quotes ' ' or double quotes " "
• Indenting your code with two or four spaces at each indentation level
• The amount of empty lines between each line of code
• Unnecessary spaces, for instance writing print () instead of print()

Here's an example of code that has been marked correctly, but does not pass all interactive steps because of an unnecessary space:

Other things that may affect steps not being checked:

• Going to a different problem, and then going back to the problem with interactive steps
• Reloading the page
• Copy-pasting code

Things like punctuation and capitalisation in strings are important to write correctly, and will affect how your code is marked. If you are not checking these interactive steps and your code is not passing, you should read over what the interactive steps are recommending you to do. Writing your code in the exact way the interactive steps describe should result in both the steps being marked and your code passing all tests.

It's important to note that even though these interactive steps provide very useful advice to correctly solve each problem, they are only guidelines, and problems do not require all of these checks to be green to then be marked as correct. As long as you are passing the problem you don't need to worry about going back to check off the interactive steps!