Communicating Iterative Development

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Communicating Iterative Development

• Charles Boisvert
• City College Norwich
• cboisver_at_ccn.ac.uk
• http//www.boisvert.me.uk

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Contents

• Why visualise iterative development
• eL-CID
• Is it any good?

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Why visualise iterative program development? (1)

• Iterative development
• Is widely used
• Is difficult to explain
• Annotations
• Multiple versions
• Time

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Why visualise iterative program development? (1)

• Iterative development
• Is widely used
• Is difficult to explain
• Annotations
• Multiple versions
• Time

5
Why visualise iterative program development? (1)

• Iterative development
• Is widely used
• Is difficult to explain
• Annotations
• Multiple versions
• Time

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Why visualise iterative program development? (2)

• Better get more efficient

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eL-CID
The development history is turned into an
animation of the program development that can be
viewed by the learners.
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Storing the development history

• ltsourcegt
• lthtmlgt
• ltbodygt
• lta href"http//images.google.com/"gtOver
  herelt/agt
• ltpgt
• ltimg src"images/charles.jpg"gt
• lt/bodygt
• lt/htmlgt
• lt/sourcegt
• ltiterationgt
• ltmovegt
• ltlinenumbergt6lt/linenumbergt
• ltcolnumbergt29lt/colnumbergt
• lt/movegt
• ltinsertgt

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Tutorials
http//www.boisvert.me.uk
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Editor
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Step methods
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eL-CID evaluation

• Web side log
• Teaching practice
• Students views

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Site usage

• Logged visits over 8 weeks - April to June 2008
• 424 separate sessions

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Site usage

• Vast majority of uses are within College
• And on the class topics

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Site usage by file

• No correlations between
• time spent viewing
• Number of command presses
• Popularity of files
• Usage is very diverse

Short but worth checking slowly files
Complicated files
Short'n'snappy files
Boring files

• We need many examples to respond to the diversity
  of students' uses and of needs

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Student views
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Evaluation from practice

• I used eL-CID in many occasions - more, in fact,
  than I had planned
• Examples are simple to show and enhance teaching
  where they are available
• Making new examples takes a long time - as bad as
  Powerpoint or good printouts
• Using the editor supports reflexive practice

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Whats iterative development then?

• Some of the tutorials are trivial
• Those might as well be static
• Some are different
• They are not trivial
• The mistakes are productive
• The partial answers are productive

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Ideas

• No more clunky interface
• Better controls and visualisation
• Better editing
• Get empirical data about development
• Social tools on site tied to data gathering
• Let students use teachers' editor and record how
  they develop
• Analyse development
• Apply to visual processes
• Viewlet
• Video recording of screen