Notes for Week #4: Authoring Tools Overview

Roger B. Blumberg, CS92/ED89, 227 CIT
http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs092/2000/cs92.rbb5.html

The CS92 Approach to Authoring and Programming

In the Educational Software Seminar we take an approach to the technology somewhat different than you might find in many computer science courses. By asking you to complete project descriptions as well as storyboards in advance of programming the application, we try to emphasize that the educational experience you want your audience to have should dictate the choice of authoring and programming tools rather than the other way around.

CS92 began in the early 1990s, and at that time students worked with local schools that had Macintosh computers. The tool of choice (under some description of "choice") was Hypercard, and many of the programs created are maintained in the CS92 Hypercard Archive. We'll begin by looking at a mathematics program designed for 8th graders at the Community Preparatory School, in Providence, in 1995. The program was called City Builders.

Looking at some of these early works, we can distinguish two different aspects/levels/strata of any piece of software: 1) the display and behaviors of the program; and 2) the authoring environment and scripting language used in order to create the display and behavior. To see this distinction more clearly. we'll look at some recent programs made with Hyperstudio, a multimedia authoring tool modeled on Hypercard.

Like Hypercard, Hyperstudio uses the "stack of cards" as a metaphor for program structure, and as we look at a program made by students in 1998 called Campaign Trail. We'll see how the displays and behaviors are created and controlled both by the "stack" structure as well as a scripting language called HyperLogo.

Next, we'll look at a more powerful authoring tool called Authorware. Here the "stack of cards" metaphor has been replaced by the metaphor of a flow chart. In addition the variety of objects that can be included and linked in the program is great, and the authoring environment is designed to minimize the need for programming behaviors with a scripting language.

Authorware is a product of Macromedia, as is the next tool we'll see, which is Director. As the name suggests, Director adopts a set of theatrical metaphors to describe the multimedia objects and their actions (e.g. stage, cast member, etc.), and the final product (the level we labeled 1 above) is packaged as a "projector". Director is perhaps the most sophisticated authoring tool we have available to us in CS92, because it combines capacity for great numbers and varieties of objects with a powerful scripting language called Lingo.

Finally, we'll consider Java, a recent and popular programming language, as an option for the creation of multimedia programs. Here the distinction between the two aspects of the program is most clear: 1) the display and behavior of the program as it is experienced by the user; and 2) the code that generates that display and behavior. We'll look at a simple Java applet, Hangman, that combines multimedia objects and actions in a nicely integrated, even elegant way.

Wondering which tool/language to choose? The first step is to figure out what sort of experience you want your students to have with your program and then consider which tool/language will be best and most versatile given your requirements. One suggestion is that you should play with some of the tools first, look at some of the programs created with them, and talk to friends and people who hang around places like CIT and MML about the tools they like. Your team can make its decision about which tool to choose right away, but it is possible and even common for teams to wait until they have started to think about the storyboard before deciding on the tool with which they will program the application.

For Next Week

Next week we'll begin discussing both design and evaluation issues. Read the Grabinger and Osman-Jouchoux 1996 and Copeland 1987 (copies have been handed out) for Tuesday; read Raymond Nickerson's "Can Technology Help Teach for Understanding" and Judah Schwartz' "The Right-Sized Byte" (both are in Software Goes To School) for Thursday.


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