Kogics

It's amazing to have all the power of Swing - reminder of the flexibility of the platform - but would be even nicer to have access to the components without resorting to custom components.

Let me wrack my brains and try to think of all the types of user input I've used (and also seen colleagues use) to build interactive online activities for students. I'm thinking about this with "educator's hat" firmly on, so more about the pedagogy than the programming!

• Text input form - as discussed [can tell you from experience that the hardest thing to deal with is entering algebraic expressions… mymaths.co.uk put a lot of effort into making it easy for students to type in an algebraic expression, and then in quizzes checking whether it is algebraically equivalent to the correct answer. Too tricky for the average educator to build something like that - so colleagues and I have always worked around with simpler alternatives e.g. "input the coefficients of the quadratic" in order to plot the appropriate graph/check the student has correctly multiplied too linear expressions or whatever. The next hardest thing to deal with is rounding issues, but this is rather more straightforward to deal with - make it explicitly clear that you want answers typed in to 2 decimal places, for instance, but it's also fairly easy to ensure in the code any input with excessive accuracy gets rounded appropriately, or to flag up "near misses" that are likely due to a rounding rather than fundamental calculation error.]
• Slider - as discussed [too many uses to list!]
• Radio buttons - the best way to design a simple multiple-choice question with only one correct answer. I find it limiting [see later] but for people who build resources using their VLE, this is very much the default, and I think I've seen more people use this than anything else.
• Drop-down - I've seen people use it for multiple-choice quizes, but discouraged them as I think all the answers should be visible on-screen without clicking on the component! But ideal for changing settings in a demonstration. E.g. on unit circle/trig animations, I've used drop-down to let students select between cos, sin, tan etc.
• Checkbox - too many uses to list, but an underrated use that I encourage is for multiple choice questions with more than one correct answer (these are great as they add cognitive challenge - have to consider each possible answer on its own merits, can't use "trick techniques" like elimination). Good for graphics options like switching grid/axes/animation on or off.
• Spinner - I've relatively rarely used these, but have seen other people use them, particularly for adjusting settings for which only a relatively small integer makes sense. They are a nice hybrid between spinner and text box. Examples: animation of a flocking algorithm, change the number of "birds" in the flock. Setting difficulty level on a practice quiz. On the unit circle/trig graph demonstration, specifying how many complete cycles to animate/graph (e.g. you start by working out what's going on from 0 to 360 degrees, but after that can add another cycle to show the wider domain of 0 to 720, and so on). Hm, on reflection maybe I've seen it used more often than I thought!

Apologies for the mutation into a wishlist!! But I can at least certify that all of the above are in the "I've used it, or seen someone else use it, and it was educationally effective" category. I've got a lot of now rather crummy old demos that I built in Visual Basic and would love to bring to life again in Kojo (trig, kinematics, matrix transformations for 3D graphics, number games…) and the forms these were heavily dependent on were dropdown, checkbox and slider.

Is it true that we're talking about two different things here:

• interactive demos
• quizzes

If so, let's work through creating a sample quiz and a sample interactive demo (we can start with either). At the end of this process, I will have a much better idea of where this set of features needs to go, and you will also have a decent overview of the possibilities.

How does that sound?

"Is it true that we're talking about two different things here?" Hm, to the extent that they're different, I think this is a "two birds with one stone" issue! But I think they're naturally very closely integrated.

Let me try and explain that, firstly technologically, and secondly educationally. Let's leave aside for now the issue of teacher access to student quiz results (student logins, central server, etc) and understand "quiz" to mean a form of self-assessment in which the student attempts to solve a problem based on the activity and receives feedback about their answer. In this context, the Storytelling feature is the main mode of interaction for the student doing an activity/quiz (as opposed to a student using Kojo to learn programming whose main mode of interaction will be via the Script Editor). It is the Storytelling feature the student uses to control movement through various stages of the activity. But they can also use it to customize or experiment with various features of the activity (e.g. picking the number to factorize in the "product of prime factors" activity) and their input is the main way of the activity giving feedback to the student (e.g. checking the student can find the lower common denominator in the "adding fractions" activity). Since Storytelling occupies such a central role, interaction with it should be rich, easy, and responsive (kids prefer to click than type, and are far more likely to experiment by moving a slider from 7 to 10 and seeing the effect instantly, than to try typing in "7, 8, 9, 10" systematically). Being limited to a text form is quite a severe constraint.

Technologically, I think the needs of activity control and quiz are very similar, because they both concern the user making an input to the program, and the activity making an appropriate response. There's a nice unit circle/sin graph demonstration that we could imagine as the basis of a future learning activity. As a designer, I would use a checkbox to let the student instantly toggle animation on/off. But I would also use checkboxes to create a self-assessment exercise ("Tick any of the following statements which are true. A: sin 30 = sin 330, B: sin 45 = sin 135, C: sin 70 = sin 200, D: sin 10 = sin 170"). No instant response to the checkboxes this time, but when the student presses a "Mark me!" button, then the Storytelling should appraise their responses, give constructive feedback, and address any misconceptions that the questions have identified. The same input method has achieved two distinct purposes.

Educationally, assessment and feedback loops are an integral part of a structured learning activity. A flashy interactive demonstration that lacks self-assessment loses a lot of its educational power - a lot of the art (and hardest work!) in crafting a learning resource, lies in giving the student sufficient freedom to explore, while also giving them necessary feedback to guide them through the learning objectives. This is especially important where the demonstration is multi-stage, and it's important to check and reinforce understanding in the early stages before building up to the more advanced concepts (see e.g. Benjamin Bloom's "learning for mastery" model). In many cases it would be useful to have both the demonstration and quiz question on-screen at the same time: rather than just exploring what can be done to the animation or diagram on the drawing canvas, we can get the student to actively use it in problem-solving (in the sin graph example above, this involves reading off a graph and hopefully relating it to the position of the angle in the unit circle). So the lines between "quiz" and "activity" are blurred - some interactivities lean more towards demonstration, others lean more heavily towards assessment, but even then there are commonalities.

Sliders, radio buttons, checkboxes and drop-downs would all enrich the student experience, and widen the capabilities of interactive demonstrations and assessment activities. (I have now thought of another thing I'd like to see added to this list, sorry!!! The Color Chooser from the Script Editor would work very well in a form that can be called out to select colors. I've always used dropdowns for basic color selection in the past, but it was a major frustration for me that e.g. when I made a pattern or graphing interactivity in Excel, I couldn't just let the students choose from a palette. I'm sure you imagine the possible uses in Kojo, even if it's just for ease of experimenting which colors to use in a pattern or blending!)

There's an activity I am working on, and will email you with where I've got to at some point in the near future. I hope that will illustrate things better.

Ah, I see.

I think what threw me off a bit was a comment on the "Documentation and tutorials/examples" thread about it being acceptable to do quizzes on a VLE in the short run - to test understanding of activities (although that was probably coming from the point of view of storage of student data).

There's an activity I am working on, and will email you with where I've got to at some point in the near future. I hope that will illustrate things better

Sounds great. Working through a concrete activity/quiz will definitely make things much clearer.
If you want to email something to me, you can find me at pant dot lalit on gmail.

Yes sorry - my fault for not being specific enough earlier! For a teacher, the pro of a quiz embedded in the VLE is that they can see the results immediately in their assessment database. But the con is that the interactivity itself can't respond to what the questions reveal about the student's understanding.

At the moment I'm still getting myself comfortable with Scala and and the Drawing Canvas. Next stop is how Scala handles classes, and getting my head around Kojo's Storytelling facilities.