Week 4 Friday

Summary:

FInished part 3, working on part four. Found a bug with recorded sounds on mac. Tried to fix it by checking the java version i was running but no luck. Henry said it worked on alice 2.0 so maybe it’s a 2.2 bug? no documentation on the alice site. Will check with rodger when she comes back

Hours: 8

Week 4 Thursday

Summary:

Finished part 2 of the getting started, working on part three. Not sure how the example world folder should be organized.

Hours: 8

Week 4 Wednesday

Summary: 

Finished part 1 of the four part series revision. Working on part 2. I’ll upload it when all 4 parts are finished and I’ve talked to deborah about the title. Need to create an examples folder and put it on the index page for the example worlds. 

Hours: 8

Week 4 Tuesday

Summary:

Finished the Billboard and Events tutorial. Working on redoing the four part tutorial. Helped unload snacks. Still some problem with writing permission in some of the folders but for now it hasn’t been causing too many problems.

Hours: 8

Week 4 Monday

Summary:

Uploaded a revised tutorial. Prof. Rodger was able to change the write access so everyone should be able to upload to the repository. Not sure why Jenna can’t create horizontal .pdfs but I can create them for her for the time being. Finished the fairyFish tutorial, uploaded to repository. Began redoing the billboard tutorials. Also got a few examples up for all the advanced tutorials currently on the site.

Hours: 8

Week 3 Friday

Summary:

Created a tutorial for uploading to the repository and teacher site. Can be found on the repository site (http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/alice09) under “instructions” at the top. Deborah made some suggestions so I updated it. Jenna will try it to test it out. Wrote up the list of tutorials on the whiteboard. Still working on the fish/fairy tutorial on mac and retaking most of the screenshots and cleaning it up.

Thoughts:

Lunch was delicious and I was glad for a chance to chat and get to know the people I’m working with better. 

Hours: 8

Week 3 Thursday

Summary:

Managed to get the tutorial page working. The content still needs to be cleaned up a bit. Redid the folder structure in the repository site so that it would work with the tutorial page. (http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/alice09) Not everything that is on the repository page is up on the workshop09 tutorial page. This is so we can test moving things around.

Instructions for moving tutorials from computer to repository:

1. Take the tutorialName.ppt and make tutorialName.pdf of the slides and tutorialNameHandout.pdf for hand out. Take a screenshot and save as tutorialNameScreen.jpg.
2. Create an exercises.html page with exercises as well as tutorial.php and publicTutorial.php pages. (will put exact code instructions later)
3. Upload all .a2w, .pdf, .ppt, .jpg, .php, .html files associated with the tutorial into a new folder under the appropriate parent folder. (alice09/tutorials/PARENT_FOLDER/tutorialName/) The parent folder would either be advancedTutorials or gettingStartedTutorials based on the nature of the tutorial.
4. Update the PARENT_FOLDER’s tutorial.php page with an include tag for the new tutorial where you want the new tutorial to show up on the page. (<?php include (“tutorialName/tutorial.php”); ?>)

Instructions for moving tutorials from repository to the workshop page:

1. Move tutorial folder (tutorialName) into corresponding parent directory in workshop09/tutorials.
2. Update the parent directory’s publicTutorial.php with (<?php include (“tutorialName/publicTutorial.php”); ?>) where you want the new tutorial to show up on the page.

Thoughts:

Hours: 8

Week 3 Wednesday

Summary: 

Managed to finish up the Invisible Heads powerpoint and make .pdfs/handouts for it. Put that as well as an edited timer tutorial up there (http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/alice09/). Had a meeting to talk about organization. Hopefully we can use the white board to keep track of what tutorials are done and are not. 

Thoughts:

Different places tutorials are/maybe at: teaching site on aliceinschools, alice08, aliceinschools tutorial page, alice09 for the new ones. Need to coordinate. Work on examples/new titles/transitions. Will work on the tutorial php tomorrow.

Hours: 8

Week 3 Tuesday

Summary:

Had a meeting this morning with the whole crew. Deborah and Lana arrived safely and we went through the general plan for the summer. Starting in late June will be the alice conference and follow up workshops then a series of one week introduction workshops. The goal now is to get the tutorials and content ready for the workshops and my part in that willl be primarily editing tutorials from last year and creating an organized and efficient repository —> tutorial site transition. I put up two of the tutorials that jenna finished (modify the layout of the Helium Tutorial so it matched the other ones and uploaded the edited kangaroo one—reconstructed the pdfs so that they matched). Something that was interesting to do was create example pages for the tutorials. Set up a dummy one for the Helium tutorial that’s just blank and needs to be filled in.

http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/alice09/

Thoughts:

The new page (looks the same but code is different) uses php include tags. So each tutorial folder has a tutorial.php file which is called by the index.php. This system doesn’t quite work with the tutorial.php yet since the root folder called is different but I should be able to get it working tomorrow. This way you only need to add one line of code (an include tag) into the document to display an additional tutorial. This should make transferring things from the repository site to the public site much easier.

Hours: 8

Week 2 Friday

Summary:

Brought my Mac today. Installed Alice on it as well as a basic text editor. Was able to access the cs server using the terminal but it’s still a new experience for me. I’m alot faster/more comfortable moving files and uploading on windows. I continued working on the repository page. Cross browser checked it, everything works except for dillo (a very basic unix broswer) and Internet explorer 5.5 (or less). Shouldn’t be a problem though, even in the IE the site looks fine (auto margins don’t work) and the experience is ultimately the same. Validated the html and css under W3 web standards, fixed the four bugs it found. The repository site design should essentially be done. I’ll continue updating and taking pictures to put up with the tutorials from the 2008 repository. Used the mac to convert the ppt into pdfs of the slide as well as a 4 slide/page handout. Set up a fully functional dummy site on my duke space:

http://duke.edu/~ewl6/alice09/

Started working on an updated tutorials page. Brushed up on the php, I think that we can streamline the conversion of content from the repository page to the tutorials page using includes so that you don’t have to have every file in two places. The hierarchy of code in the page I haven’t completely figured out. I’ll need to look at the style sheet but right now I wrote a quick style insert and created a demo page (the bunny is the example, everything else is the same)

http://duke.edu/~ewl6/alice09/tutorials.html

Thoughts:

I’m really glad I got to meet lana (sp?) and hopefully things will be a little less lonely for Jenna now that she and Deborah are here. Meeting with professor Rodger was good. She mentioned some good points about focusing on what the teachers want and getting feedback from them. We’ll hopefully be working on exercises/follow up questions with some of the longer tutorials and I liked the idea of thinking about a textbook in terms of the resources that we provide.

Hours: 8