[Sugar-devel] FUDCon hackfest proposal: assessment

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

Hello folks.

Is there any interest in figuring out how assessments might work in a 
Sugar activity API?

Teachers frequently talk about the need to assess the progress of their 
pupils.  In the context of an activity, how do teachers do that?  I don't 
think there's a clear mechanism, and I suspect that constructing such a 
mechanism might be simple.  I believe that such a feature might also help 
make a case for usefulness to teachers.

A few points/assumptions:

0. I'm guessing there will be some simple API, maybe 
"sugar.activity.assess".  Or maybe it's actually part of datastore.  I 
don't know the code well enough.  :)

1. I assume there will be a server that can collect this data, maybe 
Moodle, maybe not.  Something like...
   * Activity is suspended.
   * Assessment data is written to datastore.
   * Some process reaps recent assessment data periodically and syncs to 
server if possible, or fails gracefully if not, storing for future sync.

2. I believe that every activity should be able to report the most basic 
assessment metric, which is "time spent in an activity".  For young 
students, time spent in an activity is one of the most reliable predictors 
of mastery, and because that data can surely be collected automatically, 
it should be made available automatically.

3. I believe that it should be possible for an activity to specify 
additional, simple assessment.  This could be quite a rathole, but an 
initial possibility could be "score/max score" and timestamp.

So one can imagine an activity passing along data that might look 
something like this:

gregdek, mongo, rectangle-quest-1, 18/20, timestamp 08:31:44.
gregdek, mongo, rectangle-quest-2, 11/20, timestamp 08:52:08.
gregdek, mongo, time-in-activity, 23 minutes, timestamp 09:04:56.

Is this an interesting idea?  If so, I'd love to sit down with folks at 
the hackfest at LinuxTag and draw up a spec for how it might be 
implemented.

--g

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