China WBI

I’ve finished what I set out to do for this release — it did take longer than I thought it would, but I’m actually ahead of schedule in terms of coding, as this finishes up my scheduled coding for the month. Of course, I have quite a bit of writing to do for my final paper, so I’ll be kept busy.

Here are screenshots from the major changes in this release:

A page for doing an assessment/drilling…

I started with simple math problems so that I could focus on getting the assessment page to work properly.

If the user’s answer is correct, the page loads the next random problem, and also indicates the user’s success.

If the user’s answers are incorrect, the results appear with the correct answers, and the next problem is asked. For the purposes of this project, users don’t get partial credit.
After I got the assessment pages working, I tried implementing the riverboat problem, which resulted in the following:

Finally, I had to modify the admin pages so that the teacher could specify which problem generator would be used for a particular lesson. I called this a “curriculum” but in retrospect, it probably would be better to relate it to a set a problems within a curriculum. Anyhow, here is the create lesson page, which allows the user to specify the curriculum. The same format is used for the Edit Lesson page, and the view class page also displays the selected curriculum.

We’ll return with 0.2.1 planning after I’ve finished my writing tasks for this month.

Spring semester hasn’t officially started, but I’m on the hook to get this system running and ready by May 1.  That means it’s in my best interest to start now.

I’m going to take a different approach now that I have limited time. Although I’ll still be presenting my iteration planning, the focus is not so much on meeting a particular iteration deadline, so I’m not going to worry about estimating in even chunks, and I won’t be reporting on each story as I complete them, as this adds a lot of overhead. Instead, I’ll just be writing up my planning and retrospectives, and the iterations will be anywhere from 1 to 4 weeks. Bottom line is that I need to meet my monthly goals to stay on track.

For this month, I need to complete the framework for the drilling module, with an arithmetic-based curriculum for easy testing, and then start on a riverboat curriculum.  I’ll divide the month’s goal into two iterations, leaving a lot of the administrative aspect of assigning lessons for the 2nd iteration.

In the 1st iteration, I want to:

• Create a ProblemGenerator and ProblemSet interface framework, that is modular enough to be used with both arithmetic and riverboat problems.
• Implement the two interfaces with 3 arithmetic units — addition, subtraction, multiplication (division adds a wrinkle with decimal/remainders that makes it more difficult, and the point is just to make something easy for testing)
• Create a drilling UI that calls the appropriate generator, hardcoded for now in the lesson DB.
• Implement the two interfaces with 1 riverboat unit — TBD which kind of problem will be done.