We're holding the first ever SchoolTool development sprint next week at the New England Linux Symposium at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire, USA.
In attendance will be SchoolTool developers Albertas Agejevas (from Vilnius, Lithuania) and Stephan Richter, and from the CanDo project we'll have lead developer Paul Carduner, computer science teacher Jeff Elkner and several of his programming students from Yorktown High School in Virginia. Stephan and I will also be attending a CanDo sprint in Virginia in two weeks. Having the sprint at the New England Linux Symposium (which is somewhat mis-named now, as it is both k-12 education specific and involves open source software beyond Linux) also gives us a chance to get input from teachers, technology coordinators and sys admins also attending the conference. The primary goal of the sprint is to improve the SchoolTool user interface. This is a pressing need, something we've had trouble improving through strictly on-line conversation, and something that other conference attendees should be able to contribute good feedback on. Ideally, when we are done Wednesday evening, we'll have running code that replaces the old navigation and action menus in the left sidebar with a set of tabs and a menubar on top of the screen. Getting rid of the sidebar would be helpful in providing more screen real estate for tabular applications like gradebooks. On the other hand, such a radical change in layout may not be practical. That's one thing we'll be trying to figure out. Our student interns will also be working on sorting out smaller UI glitches, rendering problems in specific browsers and navigational dead ends. Rough schedule: Sunday: Everyone will arrive Sunday afternoon before the Monday start of the conference. We'll get settled in and set up the space we'll be using on Monday as much as possible. Make sure we can all connect to the network, etc. Monday: In the morning, we will have a session that will include some other conference attendees. The main goal of this session is to come up with some teacher and student focused use cases that will guide the subsequent UI work. We will also do a general presentation of SchoolTool and CanDo. At lunch, we'll have an opportunity to present to the conference as a whole (probably around 50 people). We'll mostly reprise the morning's work and get some additional feedback, and discuss our goals for the next two days. The rest of Monday we'll work on UI mockups and specific design ideas on whiteboard, newsprint, etc. Tuesday: We'll be sprinting in a lounge in our dormitory. This will be the heavy work day. I would like to take a break in the afternoon for some lightning talks, but otherwise, stay focused on writing actual UI code. Wednesday: We'll be back in the main building with the rest of the conference on Wednesday. Sprinting all day, with a session in the afternoon to present our work to other conference attendees. That's the plan. --Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
