[Sugar-devel] FUDCon hackfest proposal: assessment

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 14:31, Greg DeKoenigsberg<gdk at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

I think it's very interesting and have heard from several people
similar interest: GCompris, OLPC Austria, IFL (TeacherMate), etc

Will be great to talk about it in LT, maybe we could hold a session in
the sugar booth?

Or better sunday as a FUDCon session?

Regards,

Tomeu