[Sugar-devel] GSoC 2015: Interactive JavaScript Shell

[Tony Anderson]

Hi,

At the moment I am the mentor in mentors. Your understanding of the 
project matches mine. One thing we need to be careful about is fair use 
of the materials such as jsfiddle and and Code Academy. These sites do 
permit them to be used online, but do not authorize rehosting on a local 
server or redistributing to others.

Fair use, as far as I know, permits implementing a capability like 
jsfiddle independently and creating a javascript course that covers the 
same topics as Code Academy. Fortunately there are a number of free 
Javascript courses on the internet which could be used as a starting point.

Recent versions of Sugar have a Browse Activity which is based on 
Webkit. Whatever we do should work in that environment.

Your focus should be on the interactive js tool. The underlying 
javascript course could be used primarily to test the capabilities of 
the tool to
handle those features.

Tony

On 03/09/2015 03:30 AM, Richa Sehgal wrote:
> Dear Mentors,
>
> I am currently pursuing Master's in University of Illinois at Urbana 
> Champaign, USA and completed by B.Tech from Indian Institute of 
> Technology - Delhi (IIT- Delhi).
>
> I went through the various awesome projects and I really liked 
> “Interactive JavaScript Shell”.
>
> To get some background, I installed the developer version of Sugar on 
> my VirtualBox based Ubuntu VM. It is really a powerful tool to spark 
> interest in learning in students. I played with Turtle Blocks, and 
> also installed various activities. The Jump activity really brought 
> back some childhood memories!
>
> Coming to the Interactive JavaScript Shell project, I would like to 
> discuss some ideas with the community. There are various tools like 
> jsfiddle that can run JS on the fly. There is also an awesome tutorial 
> on JS: on code academy, that teaches JS from scratch. I looked into it 
> and basically what they do is teach some concepts like loops and 
> functions, and give interesting problems for students to solve and run 
> it. They start with “enter your name”, and display it and then slowly 
> proceed with the steps. We can discuss and see what features we want 
> to implement in our own tool.
>
> Having it run offline is very important as Sugar Learning Platform is 
> used by many students who do not have access to internet. This is not 
> a problem. The platform already has a browser integrated, and it 
> doesn’t care about offline mode if the html/JS is available locally. 
> So we can just store copies of libraries like jquery, etc locally.
>
> I would like to discuss more specifically about this so that I can 
> scope my proposal in a better way, and develop the timeline 
> accordingly. It would be great if the mentors can guide me in this regard.
>
> Thanks
> Richa Sehgal