Implementing

This week I've been working on implementing the design for mentors to view and create suggestions. I started off working on the "Select a World" view, where mentors choose one if their student's worlds to look at. Most of the views will involve many of the same core components, with certain modifications, so I think once I figure out all of the pieces of this one, the basics of the others will be much faster and easier. 

Although I really tried to do this before I began implementing, the difficulties in creating certain elements definitely make me reconsider their purpose in the design and whether they are a worthwhile use of space. Focusing on the "Select a World" view for mentors, the key components are browsing a set of their student's worlds and viewing the code. I think viewing the code will be the focus, because that is where mentors normally looked for spaces for improvement. I also had a view of the scene in the top left corner for the mentor to see the scene and play it. I have been struggling a bit with making the scene appear, but I do have the play button appearing. When this happened, I started to question the normal purpose of the scene view and whether it would be of any use to the mentors. It seems for mentors, it's main role would be to signal that pressing that play button will play the animation. However, when a student is creating a world, it has a lot more purpose, such as allowing students to click on the characters, which switches the selection of the code to that character. While editing a world, it can also be useful to see which characters are in the scene and where they are at the beginning for a frame of reference. I am still leaning toward including the scene view, as it may also give mentors a better quick reference to what the animation is going to look like, but implementing the view does not leave time or energy for interface pieces that aren't specifically necessary or useful. 

On the implementation side, I'm definitely understanding composites and views much better, but there are still quite a few mysteries I have yet to fully figure out.