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Suggestions for Scriptable CAI Apps?
Corvus9 asks: "I am involved with a University project for creating a Computer-Assisted Instruction application. Currently, we have teachers writing the content and CS students working on the application, which is currently being developed in Flash. However, we would like to make something that would allow teachers and non-CS students to create their own applications. Can Slashdot readers suggest some kind of authoring system that would satisfy this? Commercial and open-source applications are acceptable."
"For this to be usable by teachers, we need to provide higher-level constructs like 'multiple-choice test' or 'kinematic model' as base objects, and a scripting model usable by non-computer people whose native language is not English.
I have been searching for an embeddable scripting language to use, and have found nothing satisfactory. Some of the requirements for the scripting language are:
1. Understandable to non-programmers. Our target audience is intelligent professionals who have neither the time nor interest in learning a computer language. Concepts like function calls are very advanced for our users, and things like inheritance or threading are totally beyond them. We need something where a humanities student can look at a script and at least have some idea what it is trying to do.
2. Usable by non-English speakers. Some of our target audience are native French and Spanish speakers. This means that we need to avoid English-language keywords and avoid culture-specific punctuation. For example, in French the decimal separator is a comma, not a period so we must allow users to type in real numbers with either decimal separator, without ambiguity. Also, some ASCII characters like '#', '\', and '{}' are not available on all our user's keyboards. We could allow a 'skinnable UI' that switches between languages, but a French script must be executable on an English document.
3. Extendable. The initial concept is to provide a number of complex scripts like 'multiple-choice test' and allow the end user to customize it. This means that the application must provide some kind of IDE, or integrate with one available for Windows.
4. Create stand-alone courseware. All authoring will be done on Windows PCs, but the created courseware should be executable on Windows and Linux. Mac OS X support would be helpful as well. Flash-compatible output would be preferred."
I have been searching for an embeddable scripting language to use, and have found nothing satisfactory. Some of the requirements for the scripting language are:
1. Understandable to non-programmers. Our target audience is intelligent professionals who have neither the time nor interest in learning a computer language. Concepts like function calls are very advanced for our users, and things like inheritance or threading are totally beyond them. We need something where a humanities student can look at a script and at least have some idea what it is trying to do.
2. Usable by non-English speakers. Some of our target audience are native French and Spanish speakers. This means that we need to avoid English-language keywords and avoid culture-specific punctuation. For example, in French the decimal separator is a comma, not a period so we must allow users to type in real numbers with either decimal separator, without ambiguity. Also, some ASCII characters like '#', '\', and '{}' are not available on all our user's keyboards. We could allow a 'skinnable UI' that switches between languages, but a French script must be executable on an English document.
3. Extendable. The initial concept is to provide a number of complex scripts like 'multiple-choice test' and allow the end user to customize it. This means that the application must provide some kind of IDE, or integrate with one available for Windows.
4. Create stand-alone courseware. All authoring will be done on Windows PCs, but the created courseware should be executable on Windows and Linux. Mac OS X support would be helpful as well. Flash-compatible output would be preferred."
I don't know about you, but I enjoy buying books and reading them... and then passing them on to another when they no longer serve to enlighten me.
:)
Is it so difficult to read nowadays? I have taken online classes and I've truly missed the advantages of a good teacher and a great piece of educational literature. (Granted I have grown weary of scrolling through text files and watching flash movies.)
I miss getting handouts and highlighting relevant content, writing my own notes and then going back years later and reading them to see what new insight I had compared to my old way of thinking. Sometimes I find my thinking evolved, sometimes I wonder how I was so brilliant then and not so much now.
Perhaps you should deal with teaching students to read and write their own language. Afterwards they can learn how the big blue E takes them to "the internet (tm)".
I miss going back to handwritten notes when in the middle of doing a full install of some obscure software that throws my main workstation on the fritz.
Oh well, I guess I'm more old fashioned than I had thought.
** Try this. Goto www.openoffice.org and download a copy of open office. Have your teachers type up their handouts in OO.org opendoc format. Have them distribute to ALL their different OS using students. Students can easilly open them with whatever software they use, I hear even Microsoft has caved in and included support for OpenDoc. Perhaps if worried they can print the output in PDF format, which is readable by both Adobe Acrobat and Foxit's piece of software (look it up... free for non comm use I think). "http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_eula.htm" (free usage) Linux also has PLENTY of PDF viewers, XPDF GPDF, etc. This way you let me still PRINT my notes. (on fully recycled paper of course
~D
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler