The Magic 8 Ball Chooses..

I am currently working on a moodle course block that will randomly choose a student to answer a question in class. Why bother? Well the difficulty in class is that you have a tendency to not question students in an evenly distributed way. There is a temptation to ask the student you know will be able to answer. 

The concept for the block is to devise an algorithm that will systematically ensure that all students answer questions but (and here I confess to being particularly pleased with this rather devilish variation) if a student gets a question wrong a weighting is applied to selection so that they will be selected more often to answer questions. Students who answer correctly will be less likely to be selected. The exact weightings will be set  (or indeed turned off) by the course administrator in a block settings page.

To make the concept more interesting to students I have decided to model the selection on a Magic 8 Ball. The user will select a group from a drop down and then click the Magic 8 Ball graphic resulting in it shaking and a student name appearing in the middle. Buttons will also be provided to say whether a student answered correctly or incorrectly. For students who are absent the Magic 8 Ball will simply be clicked again to select a different student.

Open Cart: What a superb bit of free software

Just finished a job for a good friend of mine Simon Thomas over at R2Design which involved customising a free shopping cart system called Open Cart. The system is written in PHP and is based on the MVC design pattern (see my previous post here.)

I am absolutely astonished at the range of features provided by this excellent piece of software and all completely free. Take a look at their home page for more details.

Piece of Cake!

Recently I was introduced to the MVC design pattern. I have been involved in object orientated design for some years and was vaguely aware of design patterns but never really understood how they could be applied. MVC is a fantastic example of just how useful design patterns can be.

MVC stands for Model, View, Controller. Essentially any web based system is arranged so that you have a set of methods and properties for handling data (the model), a set of methods and properties for handling application logic (the controller) and the view is concerned with output to the user.

Web applications using this approach are far more robust and flexible. It makes extending functionality a joy since each part of the application is not tightly bound to the other areas of the application. One such PHP based system is called Cake PHP which provides a ready made MVC web application framework which if used correctly radically improves code productivity, security and reliability.

Another widely used (perticularly on larger scale projects) is the Zend Framework

The learning curve for these development environments can be steep at first but well worth persevering with..

This week I will mostly be working on...

A new theme for the Virtual Learning Environment (Moodle) at Shrewsbury 6th Form College.

Currently the Moodle interface at the college has many drawbacks:

Whilst the layout is full width, it does not make use of screen 'real estate' intelligently. A huge amount of space is given over to daily notices. Although some attempt is made to draw attention to these through the use of colour and animated GIFs (!) the overall effect is a wall of text that most students simply don't read.

It doesn't offer a 'jumping off' point to other areas and the blocks used are not organised or used in a way that considers the end users.

Also the header image is huge and takes a lot of room without really offering any useful functionality. Essentially it is the header from the website and students when asked have never used any of the  links along the top.

My proposed design:

 

The new design is fixed width (optimised for a minimum horizontal resolution of 1024). The announcements have been replaced by a content slider that I propose to hook up to a standard news forum. The message will change every 10 seconds or so and show the last four messages added to the news forum. 

The design does not reflect the final content only the layout. It's likely that emerging requirements will mean the content will change but this can be done through the standard Moodle blocks and content editing.

See the current progress at:

Test Moodle site