We are thinking very much along the same lines in terms of the experience we intend to provide to the student.
Your efforts are somewhat orthogonal to my preliminary goal of having secure doctests that are verified on the server but run on the client. I think we should coordinate so that our efforts can cooperate. I think these goals are not competing; the didactic doctests and the authentication doctests serve different purposes. A well-designed interactive tutorial environment is something we all want, and I encourage your efforts in this direction. The crucial issue, I think, in the success of such a project is ease of deployment. The student must have either an egg to hatch or a web page to visit. However, I am surprised to find myself inclined to the specialized client rather than the web solution. (The "rich client" or "iTunes" model) The server must either be 1) very easy to install (the skills at a typical school are shockingly low) or 2) low maintenance and highly scalable (so that skilled volunteer efforts would be sufficient. Either of these approaches becomes more difficult as the graphics load is moved to the server. A localhost solution is not going to be deployable at all, I'm afraid. We will never have the tech support resources to get webservers installed on every student's computer. I guess this means you do need to address the sandbox question, which in turn puts quite acomputational load on the server and a time and skills demand on the sysadmin. Then if you do server side greaphics rendering, you will have a hard time getting satsifactory performance, unless there is *serious* infrastructure funding. It also assumes that the student has reliable broadband. So for scalability, deployment, and support as well as security, I think computations should be done on the client, and the end user should not be required to run a localhost server. When I first started thinking along these lines I expected a browser and a webserver would be part of the design, but I now am inclined to doubt it. mt _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
