Mercedes
R. Lopez http://.cs.duke.edu/~mrl19 |
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Journals
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Summer 2007 Internship at
Duke University
sponsored
by
Computing Research
Association
Distributed Mentor Project (CRA-W DMP)
Week 1 (June 18-22) This first week has been primarily a week of getting acquainted with my new surroundings, learning my away around campus and the neighborhood, setting up accounts and acquiring access permissions, and meeting people. I read a couple of papers about previous research, provided my my mentor, Susan Rodger, and began to learn how to program in Alice. I also began designing this web page. By the end of the week we'll decide which project will be best for me to focus on. I'm leaning toward the Alice project, which will involve designing a short program to provide primary and secondary school teachers with some techniques and tools for teaching programming with Alice to their students. Week 2 (June 25-29) The focus for this week is primarily to read papers [relevant to this project] that have been published and writing short summaries of each, as well as maintiaining this web page. As time permits, I'll go through the chapters of the book, "Learning to Program with Alice" (Dann, Wanda P., et al) and take notes that might be useful for training purposes. I also played around with Alice and created a couple of virtual worlds. I've got to say that they are quite infantile, though... so I visited the alice.org website and viewed some of the virtual worlds that have been submitted by others and was quite impressed, especially with one world called "requiem", which played almost like a feature film! Week 3 (July 2-6) As usual, reading papers is one of this week's topics., but the main focus is learning Alice. There was a holiday mid-week, and I met with another DMP student -- we spent the day at the Durham Festival of the ENO. Prof. Rodger has contacted an interested party to see if/how we can collaborate on this project. Also, I sent an email to the other DMP student in the area with a list of dates Prof. Rodger and I are available to meet. Week 4 (July 9-13) I didn't get much done this week. I did manage, however, to resolve some problems that arose regarding server space and usage. For several days I wasn't able to access the server on which this website resides. I've completed the first few chapters of the Alice textbook and began going through the CS4 lessons from Prof. Rodger's Duke academic website. I also made a good dent in perusing the assigned articles and will be updating that portion of the website shortly. Focus is still learning to use Alice. Next week, Prof. Rodger and I may be meeting with a teacher who wants to use the system to create animated worlds in her elementary school classroom. Week 5 (July 16-20) This week I'll be assisting Prof. Rodger at a mini-seminar on Alice for young girls (Here's a link to the materials used in that workshop: Alice materials). In addition, we'll be meeting with an elementary school teacher later in the week to go over some ways that Alice could be used to enhance her curriculum. I created PowerPoint slides that describe how to insert a dummy camera at an object and then setting the object to be the ccamera's vehicle so that we can view an AliceWorld from an object's point of view. On Thursday morning, Prof. Rodger held an introductory Alice programming workshop for 15 high school females, at which I assisted. In the afternoon, we met with the Math and Science powers-that-be at the Board of Education to discuss the possibility of preparing educators to teach Alice to their students (focus on grades 4-8); Professor Rodgers' ideas were very well received. On Friday, we met with the head of the teacher education program at Duke to discuss the possible implementation of Alice into their teacher curriculum; again, the ideas were very well received. Due to a personal family emergency, I must complete this internship at home in San Diego. Arrangements have been made with a co-mentor. For the remainder of this project, the format of these journal pages will change to reflect daily input, after taking a couple of weeks to resolve the non-project-related issues that have arisen. Week 6 Sunday (August 5): Last week I secured office space at UCSD, obtained a key, and restructured this webpage. Week 7 Friday (August 10): Read
and summarized journals. My computer is in the shop, so I'm using a
borrowed computer. I'm not sure if my hard drive is compromised,
yet, but I do have the webpage backed up. I may, however, have to
resummarize the papers I've read. Week 8 Monday (August 20): I think I need to learn about nesting with Alice.
I've been giving some thought to how I'm going to develop the game. I
think I'm being a bit too ambitious, so instead of a board game, I'm
thinking about creating a simple multiple choice quiz in which score is
kept and the correct answers will generate some sort of animation, as
well. Week 9 Wednesday (August 29): I'm stuck on how to display the score, so must go and review that material. Week 10 Sunday (Sept. 9): I finally got the introduction working so that I'm happy with it. I'm not sure how to display the questions. If I continue as i did for question
1, the game will continue without waiting for user input. I solved a similar
problem earlier by having the user input yes or no,
but I don't want to do that for each possible choice of answer; that would be sloppy. What I'd like to do is create a list of correct answers (an array?), and then (pretty
much I did the passing of parameters to set the game up according to whether
annie or jack was clicked on) iterate through to see if it's correct. If so,
then the appropriate animation would occur. The problem is that -- as with the
clicking of jack or annie, if no click occurred, the game continued anyway. |