[Cs5500] Discussion about teaching avatar and subproject 4

[Karl Lieberherr]

Hi Tugba:

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 5:33 PM, Tugba Koc <tkoc at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
>  Hi All,
>
>  Our team discussed how the teaching avatar should behave. What we need to do for subproject 1.
>
>   Teaching Avatar : Difference between teacher avatar and clever avatar is that the teacher avatar
>   may propose a claim that`s right but not the best (optimum) claim (between 0 and 0.61 for MMG
>   to encourage student to provide a better claim). In the last round, our teacher avatar can provide
>   the best claim. In oppose, we need to strengthen the claim a little bit but not directly to the
>   optimum claim (we can strengthen the claim by a random number between the best claim and their
>   claim).

You describe a gentle teacher that gives the student information in a
gradual way.
This is definitely a good solution.

I think that you can also justify a blunt teacher that does not hold
back any information
with the danger of discouraging the student. But the student is just
an avatar, a
piece of software, and with software we don't have to be so gentle.
The blunt teacher goes to the optimum as soon as possible and strengthens
as much as possible.

Let's do both: GentleTeacher and BluntTeacher.

>
>
>  For subproject 4 (letting users define playgrounds ), we thought that the solution could be like below
>  but should be more specific :
>
>   We can provide some templates for the playground users to define their own playground.

That is a good idea. It is not always clear which code goes into which
interface implementation
and an annotated template (with comments) should guide those
decisions. Please can you take
a first cut at such a template.
I have started a "Playground Designer Guide"
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/lieber/courses/se-courses/cs5500/sp11/projects/playground-designer-user-guide.html
and you template should be a part of it.

>   We can have
>   a web interpreter for users to write their playground definition. In that case, our scg system source
>   is not open to users.

Let's discuss your web interpreter idea in person.

>
>  What do you guys think?
>

-- Karl