Group Meeting - 3.13.00

This meeting was about the storyboards. We decided to talk mostly about the goals and let our flow and design be dictated by that.

Our main goals are to teach area and perimeter. Secondary goals include familiarizing the students with shapes, colors, orientations, and word problems. Some things that we decided were important to achieve these goals are the use of sound, flashy thingies/animations, and interactivity; we spoke about creating theme music, having the student input her name at the beginning of the program so that it can talk to "her", etc.

We then spoke about the form of the application. We'll almost certainly use Director to author it, giving us great flexibility. Some objects with the application might be various palettes (color chooser, shape chooser, etc). This should work well because the students are already reasonably familiar with that paradigm, using it frequently.

We weighed the pros and cons of a tutorial-style application that would essentially lead the students through a serious of problems and giving them lots of help along the way. As a synthesis of the tutorial and not-tutorial ideas, we decided on an application which *can* solve it for/with the student but can also have the student solve the problem directly by herself.

Some final points: we discussed wheather we wanted the application to provide a very flexible free-form workspace or a more rigid sequence. Certainly, however, even a relatively rigid sequence will be randomized so that the student does not become bored.

Timeline
Mar 21 present storyboard
About Apr 11 demo palettes to a few students
About Apr 15 mock up area and perimeter "frames" (this can be done concurrently with the palettes demo)
About Apr 24 complete application, install on site
About Apr 30 complete final on site evaluation

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