Amenity

Revision 8 as of 2006-05-28 18:22:45

Clear message

Summary

Amenity aims to provide an Activity Management System to be used (in conjunction with ["Pike"]) in classrooms and to be included in Edubuntu.

Rationale

Effective, easy-to-use educational software needs to provided to aid in the adoption of Edubuntu and OSS in the education world. Open source counterparts of commercial products are very important in this respect.

Currently, no system for computerized activities exists. It would be useful for an educator to create a group of activities that students can complete from different computers.

Use cases

  • Jane, an elementary school teacher, wants to her students to complete a series of activities on a computer. She uses Amenity to create an Activity Sequence and starts a session for her class to participate in. She monitors their progress as they complete the activities.
  • John, a school teacher, wants to evaluate his progress during the school year. Using Amenity he can see how much time was spent on each Activity Sequence and compare this to other sequences or similiar sequences used by colleagues.
  • Janet, a school district administrator, wants to standardize the lesson plans for the school district. She has a committee create Activity Sequences to be distributed and used in classrooms in his district.

Scope

  • Amenity will use the Pyro Nameserver and Eventserver, so the pyro package, may need to be included in the main repository.

Design

Teacher Client

Includes the Activity Manager window and the Activity Sequence Editor window.

Activity Manager

attachment:ams-mockup.png

  • New toolbar button opens the Activity Sequence Editor Window with a new Activity Sequence.

  • Edit toolbar button opens the Activity Sequence Editor Window with an existing Activity Sequence, chosen from a gtk File Chooser Dialog.

  • Open toolbar button creates a session with an Activity Sequence and a class chosen by the user and places it under inactive in the sessions tree.

  • Save toolbar button saves the state of the selected session.

  • Delete toolbar button deletes the selected session and it's saved state file.

  • The Session info tab displays information of the selected session.

  • The Monitor tab displays the activities and which students are currently taking part in each one.

  • The Students tab displays each student's progress through the sequence.

Activity Sequence Editor Window

attachment:ase-mockup.png

  • Add toolbar button creates a new Activity of the chosen type, opens the Activity editor dialog for that type, and adds the activity to the activities tree.

  • Edit toolbar button opens the editor dialog for the currently selected activity.

  • Save toolbar button saves the Activity Sequence.

  • Delete toolbar button removes the currently selected activity from the sequence.

  • Up toolbar button moves the currently selected activity up in the sequence order.

  • Down toolbar button moves the currently selected activity down in the sequence order.

Student Client

Mockups to follow

Implementation

Code

  • Technologies used
    • Python
    • PyGTK
    • Pyro

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec