Edward Cherlin wrote:
On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 09:11, Erick Lavoie <[email protected]> wrote:
As discussed before, Tutorius is a project done by 9 students from
Université de Sherbrooke (Québec, Canada) aiming to integrate interactive
tutorials inside Sugar to guide Sugar users in learning the platform and its
activities. Our goal for december is to be able to cover most of the
content of the Floss manual.
I have started writing a new manual, tentatively Discovering Discovery
on the XO. It is based on the material in my Wiki page,
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/The_Undiscoverable. The introductory
material and the first few topics exist in draft form. I am currently
sorting obstacles by dependencies. Then I intend to create a sequence
of topics in dependency order exploring each obstacle. The intention
is to cover everything that an average student will need in order to
be able to use all of the Sugar software at grade level.
Then we have to work on the topics appropriate for each school
subject, and propose a few new subjects that are essential for
achieving the Millennium Development Goals, building a functioning
society and economy, and rebuilding the environment.
We are doing this along 3 axis:
Execution: Add the mechanisms needed to Sugar to support execution of
tutorials
What do you need besides existing activities and programming
environments, particularly TurtleArt, Pippy, Scratch, and Etoys?
I am referring to the design we have done to be able to overlay
Tutorials on top of Activities or the Shell, in a uniform way for all
GUI systems (Gtk, PyGame, Qt, Etoys, etc.) supported by Sugar. We want
teachers and students to eventually be able to write interactive guides
to Sugar without having to understand the specifics of the technologies
behind every activity. This is what will make tutorial building easy.
This is a lot more challenging than simply making sure that it is
possible to create tutorials for a specific activity.
So far, we are only supporting Gtk-based Activities but the support for
other systems should be progressively incorporated.
We do not need any extraneous libraries or third-party software other
than what is shipped with Sugar currently but we needed to add some
hooks in Sugar itself (sugar-session, Activity, etc.).
Creation: Provide tools to create tutorials from within Sugar in a GUI
environment
Same question.
Again, this is a custom design and the goal is to be able to use the
same Tutorial Creator for all Activities and Sugar itself. Based on
the FLOSS manuals, we realized that we needed more than one activity
for certain workflows so we want to be able to execute tutorials that
spans more than one Activity and guide through Sugar itself between
those activities. The Creator should enable building tutorials in a
way that is as close to the workflow an experienced user is using as
possible. Eventually, it should be easy to record the events the user
has generated to accomplish a certain workflow through many Activities
and then allow edition of that sequence for incorporating
notifications to guide another user in accomplishing the same workflow.
This is more than simply providing a help section inside an activity.
It should become a lot more concrete once we have shown a demo of the
current Creator in action.
regards,
Erick
Sharing: Provide a platform to share tutorials on the web
Definitely.
We have shown demos in the past of basic capabilities (in chronological
order), here, here and at a presentation given last April.
Next Friday, we will hang around on IRC at 13h EST and give a live demo of
the current state of the project using Yuuguu or something equivalent, with
an execution engine running in a separate process than the activity, an
overhauled tutorial creator (still running inside the activity process) and
maybe a quick overview of the sharing platform based around the addon
sharing platform from Mozilla.
We would like to exchange ideas with people and discuss technical matters
with the following goals:
Receive feedback on the work done so far
Discuss the possible integration of our system with Sugar, the SugarLabs
sharing platform and the official release cycle
Anticipate possible evolutions
Exchange ideas and pointers to similar work and papers to inspire ourselves
and avoid duplicating research efforts
Our team will disband around mid-december, but I'll keep maintaining the
project and there might be possibilities for another team of 6-8 people from
Université de Sherbrooke to push the project further in January for another
year. It would be really exciting to see a collaboration with SugarLabs
continue in the future!
For those interested in a more technical view of the inner working of the
system, see Tutorius Architecture, especially the Component section.
See you on IRC on Friday at 13h EST!
Erick Lavoie
for Tutorius
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