ASTs, we meet again!

I've been sick all week, but it's back to work now! 

Last week at our meeting, we talked about going to the science center to work with some more kids to see how they interact with the Looking Glass Community. Jordana kindly set up a date to do so and we'll being going on 10/18. In the mean time, I'll be looking back at the infrastructure needed to support the tracking of remixes. I talked with Caitlin and here is how we propose to progress.

At the beginning of the summer, Kyle and I were working on annotating the AST nodes and the xml files. The idea was that if we could identify where all the code has been written and who it has been written by, we could track code from world to world. With a more solid idea of how things will look on the user interface side of things,  it is time to return to the details in the code. 

Kyle and I originally proposed that each AST node be tagged with a property called Node Origin. This property would be similar to all the other AST properties present, but would be applied to every single node in the AST. Since the nodes represent the world that is created, by tagging the nodes, we are essentially tagging the world itself and how everything is created in the world.

I was looking back at previous blog posts and it was not properly described earlier, so here is what we were intending:

• Node Origin
• Modified
• System
• User
• User ID
• User World
• Assistance Class
• Remix
• Remix Origin ID
• DINAH Facilitated
• Remix Destination ID
• Copy
• Copy Origin AST
• Generated

At this point in the design, we began to look into use cases of tagging the AST node to ensure that the information that we tag is the information that we can use. Everything got side-tracked from that point forward and we did not look at the AST nodes for a while.

Looking back at things and talking with Caitlin, one possibility that Dennis mentioned was to use the UUIDs that already exist with each node and modifying the first/last few digits to be used as the identifiers for these properties noted above.

Some things that we need to consider are legacy worlds (worlds that come before the implementation of this notation in the files) and whether UUIDs are the best way to go about annotating these properties in the AST.