[math4] Class start-up

[Stephen Jacobs]

On 3/8/09 7:04 PM, "Greg Dekoenigsberg" <gdk at redhat.com> wrote:

> 
> On Sun, 8 Mar 2009, Stephen Jacobs wrote:
> 
>> Ok folks, the course enrollment is now up to 19 students and may well
>> hit the 25 mark (or beyond) before "add/drop" ends Monday the 16th.
>> The course meets face-to-face once a week on Fridays 10-12.
> 
> /me blinks.

Yah, me too.  Gonna be quite the rollercoaster ride.  If they don't
Want to hang me by the end of the 10 weeks it'll be a good thing.
I've actually run courses like this before that do things like take
representatives from a couple of museums and have a class of students
Build virtual exhibitions for them in 10 weeks.  I did it from '95-01,
starting when we coded everything in HTML by hand up to doing Flash sites
before the museums were mostly capable of doing this stuff on their own.
The difference this time is I won't be teaching them Python, e-toys or
scratch, they'll need to do it on their own :-)

The really encouraging thing is that if this takes off I'll have a good base
to build on, especially since or CS department will be experimenting with
teaching cs1-cs3 in Python next year :-)


> 
>> This course is a "Blended Course" which means much of the official
>> course happens on-line, not in the classroom, so I'll be building teams
>> to interface with community leaders and projects and the students will
>> be expected to have the equivalent of 2 hours a week just interacting
>> (live/e-mail, posting to forums etc) on-line.
> 
> Wow again.

Yah, will need buy-in from the community and the folks on this (growing?)
list to help us roll along


> 
>> Graphical or text only? It might be helpful to shoot for a game that's
>> as visual as possible, making it more portable across languages and
>> cultures. Has there been much thought given to that as an option?
> 
> Go download and play "Mines of Elderlore" now:
> 
> http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Mines_of_Elderlore

Will wait til tomorrow :-)
But will get the students to look at it.

> 
> Now imagine that before successfully attacking any monster, or drinking a
> health potion, or performing some other important gameplay function, you
> must answer a question of some kind.  My emphasis was to find a Free
> Software codebase that was simple, in Python, already worked, and could be
> easily hacked.  Hacked being the key word there.

Makes sense.  I'd like to see if me can move beyond straight questions and
have them solve graphic problems like aligning items in the right
geometrical forms to match a proof to do so.  Might do parallel prototyping
tracks in python and in either of the multimedia authoring packages on the
machine to look at the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.


> 
>> Has there been much of an effort to see what's gone before when
>> designing Mongo?  Have folks hit the ACM SIGGRAPH library on education
>> and games, the serious games or games 4 change mail lists and archives
>> to look at other efforts?  The students can be tasked to do a lot of
>> background design research to help look at these types of things as well
>> as do technical and content work.
> 
> Nothing at all.  :)

Gee, then I know what one of the first assignments will be :-)

> 
> Mongo is my half-baked idea.  I think it's got some good instincts, but
> I'm certainly no game designer, and I am in no way married to it.

It is absolutely a good instinct as similar efforts have been done.  I want
to "hack" the design and the content as well as the code by seeing what else
has been tried

>So long as the output is completely Free and Open Source, focuses on delivering
> educational content in a self-contained, modular way that clearly maps to
> concepts identified in curriculum frameworks, and is written in a language
> that the typical bright 14-year-old kid can hack (which is why I lean
> towards Python), I will be delighted.

Cool.

So it sounds like In addition to Eric's lecture I will have them download
the game you've pinpointed and start doing some BG research as well.  Once
we've done that we can get our heads around some design concepts

SJ


> 
> --g
> 
> --
> Got an XO that you're not using?  Loan it to a needy developer!
>    [[ http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Exchange_Registry ]]
>