[Sugar-devel] FW: Tutorius Meeting minutes - 2009/11/19

[John Tierney]

Juj>>Just wanted to mention my admiration for the Tutorious team: they have
>>pushed forward a big feature that affects shell and activities, have
>>set up their instance of AMO for tutorials, have pinged periodically
>>the community for feedback, have made a spin of SoaS so others can
>>more easily test their work, have contacted the testing team at NZ for
>>feedback, etc. And not because that's a lot of work, but because it's
>>the _right_ work to do.

>>Kudos to them and whoever is mentoring!

>>Regards,

>>Tomeu
 
Hello All,
 
Myself and Gerald Ardito had a Skype meeting with Erick Lavoie and Michael Montclam from the Tutorius Project last
Thursday Nov. 19th, the notes from that session are below. Since the comments/suggestions from Gerald and
I are U.S. based, I am in the process of trying to set up a second meeting between Tutorious and Enhanced Learning
Strategy-Ron Canuel had a Team that went down to Uruguay recently and visited 18 schools. This will give the Tutorius Team
an additional view to incorporate into the project and allow for the internationalization of Tutorious, which is one of their
objectives.
 
They are due to finalize the Project and give a Final Presentation in early December to complete this class project. They
have indicated an interest to merge Tutorius ability into Sugar when it is at a stable state. I indicated to them I would
reach out to the Sugar Developer community-Tomeu,Walter, and others to see if there can be some joint planning or conversations
that would lead to this possibilty. Please let me know how we can proceed on this front.
 
I look forward to trying to facilitate these initiatives, which I believe will be very valuable for students, teachers, and activity developers alike.
 
Best!
 
John Tierney


Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:17:23 +0000
Subject: Meeting minute - 2009/11/19
From: michael.jmontcalm at gmail.com
To: jtis4stx at hotmail.com; gerald.ardito at gmail.com

Hi guys!

Here are the notes for today's meeting. Feel free to add precisions and comments if anything was missed.

You can access the document right here : https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AVT_nzmWT2B2ZGN3dDd2MzRfNTF0dzMyNGdnag&hl=en

Thank you for your time and the great ideas!
Michael


Meeting minute 2009/11//19


Attendees : John
Gerald
Érick
Michael


Minute : 


Introduction

Gerald's tests


5 XO classrooms since January in middle school 
Doctoral thesis on Sugar 
Focus on curricular needs with teachers 

Ex : Using etoys to do an interactive story book 
Pre-testing with Test Team students in class, then attempting with the whole class 

Works really well and adds much more depth to the teaching

Gerald's view of Tutorius 

Offer assistance on learning the platform (journal, using write activity, etc...)

Using the platform is one of the hurdles to getting the most out of activities 
To have Tutorius to walk them through those skills would be incredibly useful

Gerald's perception


Tutorius would be immediately useful in teaching the basic Sugar skills 
But not so much for the specifics of the activity 
John's suggestion 

It would be great to have tutorials on how to do tutorials

Technical details


How can we deploy Tutorius on the XOs? 

Is it an activity? Can it be easily installed? 

No, it's a direct integration with the Sugar OS

Questions from John 

What are the details for the merging? 

Tutorius would need to stabilize its code base 
The activities are not all consistent (e.g. save_state function) 
A screencast utility for Sugar 

Make a tutorial inside a screencast 
Dump the screencast on the web 
Point the students to the web 
Gerald is concerned on application on the XO 

Re-flashing the XOs is not hard but would wipe all data

Could we have an automatic upload to YouTube? 
The XO is a great computer for kids because of its form factor 

It is slower, but the kids relate to the device differently 
Akin to the way they use their iPhones and MP3 players 
Re-flashing would be ok, providing a way to save data and restore it 
A screencast would be a backup plan 
Erick's question 

What does a tutorial adds to a screencast? 
Gerald : Having a label is for actions is great information 
John 

The important first step is to get a screencast tool out there with Tutorius 
First steps 

John : Short term is more important than long term 
Erick's question :


Is internationalization important? We could offer it in an easy way or a complete support. 

John : Support for this would be awesome, but sounds a bit more on the long term approach. 
Walter and Tomeu could point us better 
Error case support : if students click on the wrong button, how do we address this? 

Gerald : We could inspire ourselves from an Adobe product that does interactive screencast? Adobe Captivé 
Sharing : we have a basic, non-secure prototype. We do not have a full-fledged sharing platform. 
Gerald : 

There are no really good way to share things in Sugar yet. 
You can collaborate, but you cannot share products easily. 
Let's loop in with the Sugar devs. 
Major hurdles when training people? 

Some teachers do not possess the basic tutorial skills 

People are very good at what they do regularly (email, downloading music, etc...)

Not everyone was taught to think in general principles, or extrapolate skills

The major hurdle is that most people use Windows and find themselves lost inside Sugar, because it's not the most consistent UI. 
The focus for the first version 

would be on 

How to open an activity 
How to close an activity 
How to use the clipboard 
etc... 
Gerald would suggest


Walk through the 4 views (neighborhood, friend, home, activity)

Explain Browse 
Explain Write 
Explain the journal 
This scenario would really empower the user 
Érick mentions that our initial focus was to let the users interact with the buttons, but we could provide a non-interactive tour of the system

John says that we could show a screencast of the tour on a day, then 3 days later have them execute the interactive version on their machines

John suggests that we could also show TurtleArt


Gerald mentions that there already exists YouTube videos of turtleArt usage, as opposed to the other activities 
It would be in the list of the next

View of Tutorius 

Érick explains that our teachers warned us that explaining the validity of Sugar as a learning tool would be really hard 
Gerald mentions that the goal

Gerald says that it would require to take two classes, have one with Tutorius and another without, and prove that the former learns faster

Gerald's thesis 

How do students interact with each other when students are involved with technologies like Sugar? 
Traditionnal method does not work well; viral methods are extremely efficient 
What happens when the students don't know to do something? 

Students should become more persistent in solving problems 
At the very least, they become more social and have more initiative when learning 
John's intervention 

Tutorius could do testing locally with Ron Canuel in Magog, Québec

It would be important for Tutorius to keep in touch with other developers and actors in the Sugar project to keep the international perspective 


 

 		 	   		  
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