Bugfixes for the beginning of school

There were some issues with our last release, but tonight we fixed some of the major ones ... just in time for school! Teacher's will be visiting WPI tomorrow (Thursday), so we should be getting some great feedback. Thanks to everyone spending time on this update ... I think we have a little bit more work in making our deployment process better =)

State of Assistment: August 2007

Summary:

• The first "State of Assistment"! - Monthly letter to keep a clear Assistment's vision clear.
• The "good/bad" old days - Thank you to the people who realized we needed a change and a quick history of how we got here.
• What to expect from v3 - Quick releases - monthly feature updates / Changes from the user point-of-view.
• How Close Are We? - Pending issues: A couple small issues (more IE6 fixes, tutor extensions rendering fixes for effort bar and feedback, and general interface cleaning),
  and a new feature (resuming assistments ... abe and I are working on it).
• Where do we go from here? - Versioning, Tutor Calculator, cleaner content, and more interface updates / Infrastructure updates.

The first "State of Assistment"!

Woohoo! This is "State of Assistment ", the first of many letters/rants/musings I will write to the team. How often? Not sure, but once per release (roughly once a month) is what I'm thinking now. The purpose of this is to keep the vision of Assistment fresh in every one's mind, introduce new ideas, and ultimately guide Assistment along it's newfangled "Productization" path. (Remember when I thought I made up the word "productization"? They use it all the time here ... go figure).

These might get obscenely long as a lot of content may pile up over the month ... so I will rely on you all to tell me what's interesting to you, what you want to hear me rant about, or how you think this is "completely worthless and just my vain efforts to stick around and not let my baby go" ... umm, yes, that's a quote from myself. Hopefully it will be more valuable than that ... but again, help me make this useful to you.

The "good/bad" old days

I'm happy I never had to touch the old system. I'm also sadistically happy some folks were around that had touched the old system too much ... or possibly had the old system inappropriately touch them. Not only did they help preserve the original vision, but more importantly they were the loudest voice for why the system needed to change.

All the code you use and the UI you see today was created during that time, and the v2 system tucked away for nostalgia. I started off as a UI designer, but also started prototyping a new Assistment Builder in Rails. After convincing the leadership that Rails could save Assistment, Darren Torpey and I wrote the Assistment v3 0.1, a early prototype to show that this conversion was possible. After monthly releases, school testings, and a bunch of new developers, we are on the verge of releasing v3.

What to expect from v3

With the Java system [almost] behind us, what should we expect from this new version? What should our users expect?

First off, feature-release should be a much quicker process. The Assistment system should get new features/updates every month. Of course, this statement makes assumptions about the size of the feature, and that we have enough students working, but that's fine ... your released features shouldn't be that huge. However, this amount of time allows for features to be released in a stable, tested fashion; no more should we accept Assistment crashing for a class or students seeing error messages.

Version 3 is not just a technical rebirth, but a rethinking of everything that Assistment was. A completely new User Interface and new ways thinking about content and tutoring are really what make this version what it is. Our current users will find the new system much more intuitive, requiring little training on how to accomplish their tasks. Content creators will find that creating an assistment/problem set is MUCH quicker and logical than the previous system. Teachers can manage their classes much easier, see how their students are doing (not much change there), and use the system to maintain all their student's grades, even the non-assistment grades. Students will also see a huge difference, with bigger fonts and more logical navigation through their tutoring, hopefully this system will be more effective at tutoring the students.

How Close Are We?

Holy! It's August 20th? How close are we to moving all the classes to version 3??? Other than small bug fixes with visuals (more ie6 fixes, tutor extensions rendering fixes for effort bar and feedback, and general interface cleaning), and a new feature (resuming assistments ... abe and I are working on it), I'm comfortable to say we're almost done. For the rest of this week (8/20-24), most of our work should be focusing identifying any other "show-stopper" issues; it doesn't need to be perfect ... but we need to know what we're slacking on and make the appropriate decisions/trade offs.

Where do we go from here?

Getting to this point has been a great experience, seeing this system grow from "./script/generate model Assistment" to what we've got today. Darren, Abe, and I we're able to get it off the ground, but lots of thanks to Cody, Shane, Elijah, and Ryan for all the cool stuff you're doing and adding more depth to Assistment; I can't wait to see what else you guys will do. Thanks also to the newer developers; you're code will see the light of day very soon. =)

After this release (end of August), what will be deliver in another month? I see this next release as including things such as Versioning, Tutor Calculator, cleaner content, and more interface updates. Also, we should also look at our infrastructure, finding ways to make our setup be as effective as possible (dedicated web-server for static content, database replication, rails page/action caching).

In Conclusion ...

This is a great time to be working on Assistment; we really have a chance to be the best tutoring software out there. I wish I could be in schools seeing students learning from our work, but you'll just have to let me know how it goes. =)

Any Questions? Comments? Suggestions? I hope this was useful/informative to some of you ... at least to convey some sort of consistent direction/vision. Again, if there's anything you'd like me to cover in this, let me know.

Assistment 0.8

http://assistment3.cs.wpi.edu
Assistment 0.8 has been released! This release has a lot of cool new features, and I'm so excited about them I'm actually going to show you screenshots and walk through them! Sorry, I don't have time to do a walk through now, but I will amend this post in the near future.

1.) Teacher Gradebook and Reports (Thanks Cody and Duc!)
2.) Effort Visualization (Thanks Elijah!)
3.) Content Feedback (Thanks Shane!)
4.) Content Ownership
5.) Curriculum Management (Thanks Shane!)

As always, please visit the SourceForge page to report defects or suggest new features.

https://sourceforge.wpi.edu/sf/projects/assistments

Release Hickup

Woops, there's a little issue with the data ... about a 1/3 of the Assistments don't have problem bodies, answers, hints, etc. Abe and I are working on it as we speak; we'll let you know when anything changes.

[edit] Ok, the data issue is fixed ... however the tutor will always give you the second hint when you ask for hints ... I'm not too sure why but it works fine locally ... so I'll have to look into it. [/edit]

Assistment 0.7

All,

http://assistment3.cs.wpi.edu

Assistment 0.7 is released! We apologize for this long overdue release, but we promise you won't be disappointed! This update includes layout/data fixes, tagging of content, content creation RESTful web service, UI improvements, and the first version of the Gradebook, to name a few.

Over the next two months we will have 2-3 releases up to 1.0; these will include the effort bar, content feedback and sharing, details reports, teacher gradebook, tutor extensions, and better compatibility with Internet Explorer 6-7, and a some other new feature previews.

As always, please visit the SourceForge page to report defects or suggest new features.

https://sourceforge.wpi.edu/sf/projects/assistments

~Jimmy

PS. If any of you don't know, I am living in Seattle now and I start at Microsoft on Monday. However, since the group I'm working with has nothing to do with tutoring systems ... I'm safe to continue on the project, as I intend to do. Assistment is a one-of-a-kind project, in the tutoring world and in the web application world, and hopefully my future connections can get Assistment more public exposure.

Assistment 0.6

http://assistment3.cs.wpi.edu

Assistment 0.6 is out! Some of the highlighted features include:

1. Sequence/Section Builder
2. Smart Sections which have certain strategies of fetching the next assistment (Thanks Derek):
1. Linear
2. RandomChildOrder
3. NoRepeats
4. NumericLimit
5. TemporalLimit
6. ChooseOne
7. GroupSequencesFromChild
8. RandomIterate
3. Visual improvements/early IE6 student tutoring
4. Actual Assistment Data! (Thanks Abe and Jozsef!)
1. Assistments
2. Users
3. Schools
4. Classes
   

Also, the version numbering scheme has changed to follow the major.minor[.revision[.build]] scheme (check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning) for more information. We've change the previous versions too, so here's how they map:

0.1 - January Prototype
0.2 - Beta 1
0.3 - Beta 2
0.4 - preRC1
0.5 - RC1
0.6 - RC2

Release Candidate 1

All,

http://assistment3.cs.wpi.edu

There's a new release up there! Students can now tell what assignments they've completed/not-finished, the preview window now scrolls, and the student tutor has a fancy new look! There's other new changes in there, but I just can't remember right now.

Anyway, restarting assignments and smarter sequences/sections are on the horizon in the next couple days. As always, let me know of any issues you have. Thanks!

Want to preview Assistments?

You got it!

http://assistment3.cs.wpi.edu/

You'll notice all the content (assignment, sequence, assistment) you view as a content creator/teacher has a preview link next to it ... if you click on that you'll get a pop-up window that will let you preview the content.

If you think the pop-up is a little intrusive ... I agree with you, and I'm planning on using something like Lightbox (http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/ ) to show the preview. Also, I'm aware the pop-up window doesn't have scroll bars ... sorry about that; ... I'll figure out why for the next release. If you have any other ideas, let me know.

To quickly address the "Fill in the blank" problem type, it actually should be just called "fill in" ... since it's only intended to be one box regardless of the number of possible answers. However, for the next update, I will make "fill in" work properly, and actually get what you all expect "fill in the blank" to be working.

technorati tags:release

Problem Types

All,

http://assistment3.cs.wpi.edu

We now have problem types! These types are:

Multiple Choice (select 1 correct answer)
Multiple Multiple Choice (select all correct answers)
Rank
Fill in the blank
Algebra Evaluation

I've set upan Assistment called "Problem Type Test" so you can see these things inaction, so *just* create a teacher and student account and assign it toyourself to check it out. Sorry about the hoops you have to jumpthrough to see this, but when I enable previewing of Assistments thiswill be much easier! =)

As always, you can post bugs to SourceForge or email me directly.

technorati tags:release

Assistment 3.0 "pre" Release Candidate 1

All,

http://assistment3.cs.wpi.edu

Assistment 3.0 preRC1 is live! This release includes:

1.) New 3.0 User Interface (Firefox tested only)
2.) Straight-forward creation of Assistments and how they are assigned to students
3.) Teacher Class/Assignments/Roster management, including multiple teachers in a class.
4.) Student Assignments and tutoring.
5.) User profile management

Mostly this release focused on refactoring and unit/functional testing. We have a lot of work going on in other branches, almost ready to be committed to the trunk. These features include:

1.) Knowledge Component/Transfer Models. (Thanks Abe)
2.) Non-linear options for dispatching Assistments to students (Thanks Derek)
3.) Problem Types (multiple choice, fill in, algebra equivalence, etc) (Thanks Danny for the algebra equiv)
4.) Assignment and Assistment reports (Thanks Duc)
5.) User account management for admins and teachers
6.) Assistment/Assignment searching
7.) Real content, including Assistments (Thanks Abe, Jozsef, and Igor)

We will release these features as they become available, so keep your eyes open for these. Please submit any bug reports/feature requests to https://sourceforge.wpi.edu/sf/tracker/do/listArtifacts/projects.assistments/tracker.defects_releases (make sure to select "Pre Release Candidate 1" when submitting).

Enjoy :)

Upcoming Milestone

Friday, April 6th, is our scheduled release candidate, woohoo! Unfortunately, features will continually be added after this point, but the subsequent releases will be frequent (1-2 a week) and there will be plenty of testing time before our release date of April 21st.

I will be giving a talk about this release in the Fuller Labs Beckett Conference Room (FL 246) at 11:00 a.m on Thursday, April 5th, so if you want a first-hand experience come check it out!

... more information will come on Friday.

You're probably thinking, "What happened to the beta"? That was a unreleased beta, and just decided to push through to release. I know, not ideal, but just the way it is.

UI Redesign

Yes, it's been a very long time; but the wait will be well worth it.

If you were a little unsure about your love for the new user interface, you're not alone! It was really intended to be a stepping stone to this:

http://nth1.wpi.edu/~jschementi/ui/designs/layout/layout2-html/

All the image mock ups can be found at http://nth1.wpi.edu/~jschementi/ui/. Please let me know what you think of it, as this new look to Assistment will probably be around for a while!

Move to WPI SourceForge

Today we completed the move to WPI SourceForge; we're using it only for trackers and tasks, as we already have a Wiki, file releases are un-necessary since it's a web application (except we use them internally just to track bugs), we use Google Groups to track discussions, and we have our own Subversion repository ... so trackers and tasks are all that's left!

Here's the link to our SourceForge page:
https://sourceforge.wpi.edu/sf/projects/assistments

If you're unfamiliar with SourceForge-ese, trackers are the primary way to track defects. To post a defect, just visit our tracker page and post a defect to one of the defect trackers (currently there are 2 -- one for development bugs and one for released bugs). Also, you can submit feature requests to the ... feature requests tracker!

As always, enjoy!

(Yes you heard correctly; we have moved away from Basecamp -- mainly because we "needed" "heavier" tasks ... yes that was a lot of quotes; basically with the size team we have we will need the reports SourceForge provides. We still love you basecamp!).

Gotta have Docs ...

You'll notice a new link in the ... links section ... Documentation. The past week we've been working on documenting everything we've got ... and this is what we have to show for it! It currently only has the requirements list, use cases, and system documentation, but they'll be more to add soon (like database schema/diagram and model class diagrams). Enjoy!

Assistment on Rails - Alpha

That's right people ... we have a blog! And what better way to kick off a first post than to announce the first version of Assistment! You can check it out at http://nth5.wpi.edu. The plan is to release something every week; next week will be a crazy amount of documentation. Yeah, I know, not as exciting :(

Feel free to comment here on any issues you find, or email me directly. Enjoy!

~Jimmy