New frontpage

By Reilly Ellis

At our Friday work morning last week, Caitlin, Mary and I came up with a sketch for the new frontpage of the website. We want it to answer the following questions: What the heck is this thing?...

It's all in the details

By Michelle Ichinco

I have continued working on my paper this week and have started moving from an outline toward a draft. I think one of the biggest challenges about writing about something I have done is that I know...

Red Array of Death fixed, onward to exposing Types!

By pcarleton

After discussion in the meeting last week, I will be pumping the brakes on my mini-gallery effort.  Making local variables more visible to the users is problem that needs solving, but the...

Designing for the Future of Code Tests

By Aaron Zemach

My week involved a little bit of actually writing code--getting a new branch working and a couple of bug fixes--but a lot of design. Earlier in the week, I had a meeting with Kyle to continue a...

A Community-Infused File Open Perspective and Looking Glass Design Principles

By Caitlin Kelleher

One of the themes that has been coming up with some frequency in our recent discussions is the need to tell Looking Glass’s story throughout both the community and the IDE. Following our...

At last, at last

By Jordana Kerr

Since my last post, my IRB was approved and I booked 36 children to participate in the challenges study, which starts this Saturday. I have the specialized IDEs built and ready to go, challenges...

Mentor Code Changes

By Michelle Ichinco

To keep moving forward on the implementation while I'm working out a few design issues, I worked on filling in any missing pieces and fixing issues with the Select a World view and the Make a...

Fixes, Logs, Tags

By Jordana Kerr

  There’s a strong indication that being involved or identifying with a subgroup within an online community increases the chances that a member will stay active within that community,...

What's Currently Wrong with Our Tutorials

By Kyle J. Harms

  This week I'm in the process of trying to trim down our tutorials into something that is more manageable and less over-whelming to our users. The basic assumption here is that our tutorials...

Kids Technical University Debrief

By Caitlin Kelleher

I had the pleasure and honor of spending last Saturday at Virginia State University's Kids Technical University giving a talk on Computer Sciencein the World to a fun group of kids. I am pleased to...

Video Tutorials

By Jordana Kerr

Here are video tutorials explaining how to get started, build a custom scene, and add animations to your story. This post will soon include remixing and sharing to the community. Soon, these...

Video Tutorials (A sneak peek!)

By Jordana Kerr

Here is a sneak peek at the video tutorial resources to come! Voice directions and captions will be added, and these videos will be adjusted and tailored a bit visually, but they're a good starting...

Of mushrooms and gears

By Reilly Ellis

After creating the storytelling badges as a whole last week, this week was all about defining the details and drawing designs. I spent some time parsing out what the individual skills would be...

Week 5: Test Editor Interface Walkthrough

By Patrick Nevels

  Fictitious mentor: Sam Fictitious mentee: Kate Authoring Process One day, Sam notices that Kate’s world includes redundant code. Each of Kate’s twelve characters says...

Remix Visualization

By Michael Liu

To encourage users to use the remix visualization, it needs to be somehow both interactive and educational. The evolutionary history of a world is unlikely to be that interesting to most children....

Let's Get Down to Business

By Genevieve Buthod

This week, I felt I took a step into what it actually means to do research work as a computer scientist, specifically in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. First of all, I learned how...

Connecting Gears

By Reilly Ellis

After the meeting last week, I started out this week trying to tame the snarl of badges thoughts that were whirling about in my brain. Here is the (simple) story of how badges work. User Jenny...

Welcome to the Looking Glass Community

By Jordana Kerr

Welcome! Looking Glass is an interactive 3D programming environment for novice programmers in and around the middle school age. The Looking Glass Community is designed to support Looking Glass...