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."

Comments

Arrogant, Naive, Just a hint of Dumb. Delicious!

[strangedays]

Well!, I for one really enjoyed the naive mix of arrogance and ignorance scattered thru this post. Apparently they are going to throw together a quick solution to a few of the most intractable problems of CS and HCI, so a few so called "intelligent professionals" dont have to do anything as mundane or boring as learning to control the worlds most complex information systems.

I am mildly concerend that these same "intelligent professionals" who have "neither the time nor interest in learning a computer language" are probably the ones we pay to teach some of our kids something about computer systems.

Just for fun, freind, your "requirements" have a few hidden complexities.

You want an idiotproof, multicultural, multilocale, extensible, IDE enabled, cross platform, multimedia script authoring tool, that can be integrated into a content creation system developed by a university "team:of CS students using Flash!?

Basic acquisition method : "Lets ask slashdot!" Target Architecture: Anything anywhere. Deployment Architecture: Undefined. Development team: Deprecated, poorly led, students.

Oh yeah..., I am sooo excited, this is really gonna work !.

Gimme a break will ya and go tell your academic sponsors to get some real professors and "intelligent professionals" onto the job of teaching what it really takes to solve these kind of problems.

Prediction: You and your team are going to spend a coupla semesters at most throwing together a fundamentally useless and unusable mish-mash of kludged scripts, spackle it with lame content and unreadable user-doc, then make an end of project presentation, publishes some articles, and scurry off to get a real job. Everyone in the faculty claims a victory and "progress" is deemed to have occurred.

Here's a hard but real lesson for free: Academics, professors, imho, typically know nothing about building real information systems. They may in fact be an example of negative information in this area. A simple request: Learn to survive silly projects without bothering other people.