[Server-devel] Some notes on the What you paint is what you get

Martin Langhoff martin at laptop.org
Wed Mar 25 06:47:53 EDT 2009


Alex Wulms was recently asking for some detail on this in a private
conversation -- the revelevant bits below...

[ to everyone involved, let's have the conversations via server-devel :-) ]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 11:16 AM, Alex Wulms <alex.wulms at scarlet.be> wrote:
> Regarding the finger painting application: at the moment we don't have much
> information about what is expected about it.
>
> Here is the info that we have:
> --- start of info
> *       Moodle is the Course Management System / Learning Management System.
> It is the "main face" of the webbased tools that the
> School Server offers. Most of online (webbased) interaction is via forms -- a
> text-heavy approach, thus aimed at older kids.
> *       Young children find it easier to paint and draw.
> *       If we can switch the WYSIWYG HTML editors in forms with a Paint Here
> facility, then we make web based tools easier for them.
>
>
> This project aims to develop a finger painting facility.
>
> Implementation idea
>
> *       Write a vector-based "paint" facility in JS that runs in the browser.
> *       Write a vector or bitmap paint facility in Flash, bearing in mind that
> OLPC ships Gnash instead of Adobe's Flash
>
> Technical notes
>
> *       Moodle is using a WYSIWYG editor called TinyMCE - that is a possible
> integration point.
> *       Performance matters - the OLPC XO has a relatively low power CPU, so
> image editing has to be tuned / optimised to be
> responsive
> --- end of info

That info is pretty much all I have too ;-) there is a thread I
started on moodle.org where I asked people to report on nice Flash or
JS based editors, and a few very nice ones emerged. It's nice to play
with the many implementations out there, and see what feels good.

(I think I posted that link before, don't have it handy atm...)

> So we have a few questions.
>
> One question is the age category that you have in mind for this application.

6 to 12 roughly. But "kids of any age" is my target ;-)

I am already taking the TinyMCE editor and switching off most options.
A very simple editor is enough (brush size, color, eraser). A
sophisticated editor can be a bonus, but it's only interesting the
main goal is that the "core" functionality works really well.

In other words, if there are more buttons, we might hide them as we do
with tinymce.

Another aspect of 'sophistication' -- after looking at many editors,
the most valuable feature I've seen is the "replay" button, way more
important than anything else. (see the thread in moodle.org about the
editors ;-) )

> Another question is about how you see the further integration with Moodle and
> potentially with TinyMCE.

 - If it is possible to integrate it into TinyMCE itself it might be a
good idea -- means that it canbe reused by any other webapp using
TinyMCE :-)

 - I _think_ that TinyMCE is relatively modular. If this can "plugin"
into tinyMCE, great so moodle can ship a "standard" TinyMCE with a
plugni, rather than a patched TinyMCE. This may well be impossible
though :-/

>  How would you see a typical use case or
> user-interaction? Would the school server for example show an assignment
> like 'paint a tree' and then the child would paint the tree and submit it
> back to the server for review by the teacher?

Yes. Or propose "paint something" in a moodle forum which is more fun
and educational than an assignment.

My example "use cases" and notes...

 - I want to use moodle's forum and "just paint" instead of writing each post.

 - As a teacher, when I hit 'edit' to edit the texts in the course
outline page (technically called "labels" in moodle code), I want to
be able to paint.

 - Nice workflow for the user:
  - I am using TinyMCE, there is a button that switches mode to 'painting'
  - Nice to have: if I've written something before hitting the
'painting' switch, then I would paint in top of that (the written
words get rendered...)
  - I am _not_ expecting to be able to switch back from painting to
writing. Keep it simple...

> Should the children be able to
> save their paintings on the server and also load/retrieve them again from the
> server?

Well, they aren't "separate documents" -- they'd get just teh same
treatment that the content of an html-area (TinyMCE) driven form gets.
Most TinyMCE-powered forms in Moodle also accept an attachment (and if
it's an image, moodle will display it inline). This feaure could be
available only on those forms, so the changes to moodle core code
would be none or minimal.

> Or would loading/saving only happen locally on the XO?

Working with the XO apps is something I want to avoid, because it
forces many steps for the user.

The whole magic of this is "paint right there in the form". We already
have "switch to a Paint program, paint, save, go to the browser,pick
the file to submit, post it", and it's unusable for young kids, and
uncomfortable for everyone...

cheers,



m
--
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff


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