DREU Blog: Week 9

Today was the first day of work with no workshop in a very long time. I made some changes to the plotting points tutorial, the cooking tutorial, and the catch tutorial. I uploaded all of those as well as some other things I still needed to upload. I read another paper (on my links page). I worked a little bit on my ninja game. I also worked on part two of my cooking world (setting the table)

Today I added prerequisites to some of the tutorials on the website, so people will know what other tutorials they will need to have already done. I also added a lot more to my cooking world. It now uses most of the vocabulary in the food section of the spanish book I have. It took a while because most of them I had to download pictures for and make billboards since Alice did not have those objects. However, I did end up finding a good website for getting clipart www.clker.com. All the files are png so I didn't have to worry about having a white box around each object like the jpegs do. That was a lot quicker than having to sort through images in google.

Today I finished the advanced cooking world. I also created an English version and uploaded both to the website. I added prerequisites to some more tutorials. I worked on my ninja game also. I was mainly looking for glitches and trying to fix them. It was somewhat tedious because parts of the world are random so if I wanted to check if a certain case worked, I might have to play it several times (not to mention if I actuallly die). I also added boundaries to the world so you can't move out of the camera's veiw. This was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Collision detection usually seems to end up that way in Alice. The last thing I did was work on my biking world that I started a long time ago. The plan is that the player will have to create a scatter plot using a distance vs. time graph. Then they will make a best fit line and predict how long it will take to get to a further distance.

Today worked on my biking world. The player can collect 3 data points by clicking on the clock 3 times during the bike ride. Then they have to plot the 3 points on a graph. It took a very long time to get it to display the time and distance when the clock is clicked. It was especially difficult because when you display a number in Alice, it often shows up as a very long decimal. But eventually, I figured out a way to display the number with only 2 digits after the decimal point. There was also one point when it seemed to be calling the method several times when you clicked on the clock. I spent a long time trying to find where I messed up. Eventually I figured out that I didn't do anything wrong, I just needed to restart Alice. I wished I had thought of that earlier.

I also went through a tutorial Professor Rodger made to give her feedback. Then I moved all of my tutorials to the Alice 09 page which has now been renamed the 09-10 page.

Today I worked some more on my biking world. It is pretty much finished now. Then I went through the tutorials page and looked for broken links. That was a bit of a tedious task but needed to be done. I also met my Grad student mentor. She said she was very interested in learning more about Alice. We each showed her the worlds that we've been working on. She seemed to like them. Then, I made some modifications to my pearls world and uploaded it. I tried to make a new video too but the exporter was not working very well.