Sticking Stickies

After having lots of one-on-one conversations with myself about the badges system, we were able to put them to the test this week. The other REU students, Jordana, Caitlin and I sat down in the conference room and wrote down all of the concepts we thought were anyway relevant to badges on sticky notes (many, many sticky notes). They were grouped into three categories: programming constructs, community actions, and API things.

We first tried out the levels organization system. This system takes a concept (like “Do-Together” or “Sharing”) and then divides the associated skills into four levels. Jordana and I worked on dividing up the programming constructs into concepts and then breaking up those concepts into levels. We discovered that the action ordering boxes pretty much had two routes: types and nesting. (e.g. Each in Togethers with locally declared arrays vs. Each in Togethers with nested Count loops). Although the types of action ordering boxes fit very well into the levels structure, the nesting levels seemed contrived. Why was an If with an Each in Together higher than an If with a Count? What storytelling goals do those combinations have? However, not all nesting is created equal, so getting rid of the nesting altogether is not ideal. Do in Orders inside of Do Togethers is an import concept to learn.

Meanwhile, the API badges encompassed many concepts that didn’t fit in the badge space. Things likes “find the play & explore” seemed to fit better in an “Introduction to Looking Glass” space. We floated the idea of having a scavenger-hunt like game that would introduce some helpful options in Looking Glass and/or teach the user how to remix challenging code (e.g. code hidden in another method, etc). Caitlin and Mary’s level version of the community badges looked very promising.

Next, we jumbled our pairs and got to work arranging the badges under storytelling goals. Jordana, Michael, and Mary came up with some pun-tastic names for their system that was more construct based. Caitlin and I worked on developing a system that would followed a user from sharing their very first story to animating characters to adding randomized background actions. We tried to sort each “lesson” into levels and consider how each lesson led into the other ones. We also thought about how remixing would play into this scheme. Perhaps each level has a “remix” and a “full” distinction. We’re not quite done yet, but this organizational system feels really good. It answers the question of “Why am I learning this concept?” as well as giving the user some flexibility how they achieve the badge.

When not running around putting stickies on blackboards, I worked on my Ruby skills. I added a link to the likes count on the worlds show page so you can expand it and see who liked that world.