China WBI

This release is slated to be a UI-only release. The last release completed the features slated for the scope of this project, and at this point, I wanted to do a major design touch-up. I don’t think there is much point in breaking this down to stories, as I find that my UI design time can be fairly unpredictable. Sometimes a design can go well on the first try, but more often than not, there are little details that just feel missing or out of place, which can take a considerable amount of time to fix.

That being said, I do have a time limit on this project, and am itching to finish the rest of my paper so that I can get a draft to my advisor and 2nd reader by April 1, or sooner if possible.

The major goal for this release is that the website not be just so plainly ugly. I made virtually no effort on design-related work throughout the project, in faith that it would theoretically not be too difficult to apply design changes separate from implementation, through CSS. Of course, that’s the theory, but I’m a little wary of how well that will carry over into what ASP allows.

We’ll see how it goes.

This iteration went very well, and I’m happy to say that I was able to accomplish my stretch goals as well, in fairly good time.

Here are the major changes:

1) First, I expanded the riverboat problem curriculum to include calculating drift distance. I could have gone further to implement other problems, but felt that it wasn’t going to add a lot to the project for where I want to take it for now. A screenshot from the new problem supported:

In this case, only one answer is necessary, so the problem was fairly simple to support.

2) I then wanted to show the student their mastery status as they were progressing through the assessment. Because I’m not smart enough to figure out the answer to these riverboat problems in my head, I opted for testing in the Arithmetic section.

Here’s a screenshot from someone working on their mastery status:

And then someone who has achieved mastery level:

3) I then wanted to allow the user to see their mastery level status for all the lessons in a class they were enrolled in. While I was making these changes, I also took a little time to organize the layout into two columns, as the page was getting pretty long. I also started also displaying the mastery level goal for the lesson.

The second part of this was to also show the percentage of the user’s study group that had achieved mastery.

Looks like this student is not doing so great, and neither is the study group.

Admin users got a similar layout change:

4) Finally, student users needed to be able to drill down to look at their own study group and see the mastery level of their study group peers:

Admin users needed to see this for the whole class and for each study group:

So, I’m pretty happy with where I am now in this iteration, as I’ve given myself a little breathing room for next month’s iteration. At this point, I just need to take a step back and tweak the user experience a little in terms of each page, and then start on a comprehensive UI rework, the one I’ve been promising all along that has excused the general ugliness of the entire project.

I also have a significant amount of writing to do so that I can get drafts into the hands of my advisor and second reader by April 1.

It’s February and time for a new iteration. This month’s projected goal was to finish up the riverboat problems and code the assessment policy. This breaks down into the following stories:

• Implement 2 more riverboat problems as instructional units. The current riverboat lesson only has one type of problem supported.
• Implement middleware to calculate a score average and update the user’s score total for the last 10 problems, hardcoded. (This would probably be more in real life, but we’re limiting to 10 scores evaluated for easier testing and verification).
• Implement the middleware in previous story to access the DB.

Although these stories will encompass the projected features for this month, I wanted to add some stretch goals to ease next month’s iteration, if possible. They are:

• Determine and display the user’s mastery status for each instructional unit in the class view.
• Determine and display each student’s mastery status to admins in the lesson view.