Runnin' on Ruby

This week, I dove right back into the fun (and sometimes confusing) waters of the Community.

I started this week by designing the badge icons in Inkscape. I think they are quite cute, but I’m a little worried that the users won’t be able to distinguish the platinum from the silver.


I then played around with stylesheets in order to make room for the badges on the user’s page. The badges will be replacing the list of icons underneath the “About” in the right-hand column. Badges will show most of that information (challenges, etc.). However, date joined, the number of remixes, and the number of followers isn’t apparent anywhere else. Therefore, that information migrated up to underneath the user profile. Originally, I had gender up there as well. However, it is kind of awkward to have that information displayed so prominently. Hopefully, the descriptions that go along with badges (“Jordana can make her characters move”) will be able to subtly indicate gender.

With Jordana back on Tuesday, it was time to get down to the nitty-gritty stuff. We did a lot of brainstorming about our new (and improved!) badges structure that includes tables in the database and classes where we can insert logic. Jordana helped implement the databases and Jordana and Kyle both helped a lot with implementing the classes. It took me some time to wrap my brain around who was talking with who and what information was coming from where. After some poking, prodding, and quite a bit of muddling, my mental image of the organization system is much clearer.

I also worked on making it so we can grab all of the levels earned by a user for a particular badge category (and learned a lot about database queries in the process.) Now that I have this information, the next step is implementing the logic to figure out what gets displayed (e.g. if Mary has a bronze level Stories 101, bronze remix level Stories 101, and a silver remix Stories 101, the badge will be colored bronze with a silver ring around it).  There also should be a method that lets us know if the badge is complete or not.

In the course of figuring out how best to implement (and where to put) this method, more questions have arisen:

1. When a user has just remixed a level, it shows up as a ring, but what happens when she passes the test for the level on her own, but hasn’t remixed a world at that level yet?

2. What happens when the user has earned the full bronze, silver, and platinum levels on her own, but hasn’t gotten the gold one yet? (This could be the case for some badges, like Teaching Actions and Scene Layout, where the upper levels don’t require all of the lower levels’ skils)

My preliminary answers

1.  Half of the badge changes to the color of the level done on its own, but not yet remixed

2. We could only display the silver until the user achieves the gold. However, she  may be left wondering where their platinum badge went. I’m not sure how we would communicate the visualization to the user.

Thoughts?