If you want to see some pictures as well, go to: http://tuttlesvc.teacherhosting.com/wordpress/?p=152
I've had a perversely difficult time writing up the results of days 2 and 3 of our SchoolTool sprint at the New England Linux Symposium at the University of New Hampshire. When I got back to Providence on Wednesday evening, I was so amped up I just felt like I ought to try to calm down; but then Thursday I was just down in the dumps, partly because I was tired from the sprint and I think partly because it was a bummer to return to the fortress of solitude after having eight enthusiastic co-conspirators on hand for three days. Anyhow, the first SchoolTool sprint was, by unanimous consent, a raging success. Matt and Dave gave us time to present the results of two day's work during lunch the third and last day of the conference. We had four things to present. First, I demo-ed some fairly straightforward changes we made to the classroom attendance-taking form, based on feedback we received from with attendees the first morning. Then Linda and Will, two of Jeff Elkner's high school students, presented a module for SchoolTool which they've been working on (with fellow sprinter Robbie and others) to allow students to select their own courses. Following that, Eldar Omuraliev presented a SchoolTool component that Jeff has been asking for all year. Basically, it allows Jeff to create Python programming assignments in the form of doctests through the SchoolTool web interface. His students can then enter their solutions into a different web form and get immediate feedback. This really requires a screencast to explain. The cool part is that the whole thing was essentially written between about midnight and 5:00 AM by Eldar and Stephan Richter. This was possible because all the necessary pieces were already freely available; they just had to be wired together. The grand finale was Paul Carduner's presentation of a major redesign of SchoolTool's navigation scheme. It isn't earth-shatteringly innovative (tabs!), but it is a clear improvement in a number of ways, it was something we had been hung up on for months and unable to do remotely, and Paul almost singlehandedly wrote about 75% of the new implementation in a day (with help from Stephan and Albertas). One of the meta-goals of SchoolTool is to figure out how to philanthopically fund and manage open source software development for schools. Unfortunately, I feel like the list of "don'ts" I've learned is much longer than the "dos." This sprint was the first thing which has felt 100% on the right track. We managed to solve some tricky problems, build community, learn a lot and make everyone feel good about themselves, SchoolTool and free software, all at the same time. I'm hoping we'll be able to do a lot more sprints next year, again including students, both at conferences and at our partner schools, and hopefully in the not too distant future with commercial firms looking to support SchoolTool and Edubuntu. --Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
