supporting studio-based design courses with django-courseapp
DESCRIPTION
Presented at the Stanford Open Source (un)conference 2008TRANSCRIPT
stanford hci group / symbolic systems
http://hci.stanford.eduMike Krieger · 14 November 2008
Supporting studio-based design courses with Django-courseapp
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Background
Me Stanford HCI & Open source
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Need
CS147 — Introduction to HCI ~160 students Weekly assignments (either team or
individual) Shared visibility of work after submission Multimedia embedding
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Inspiration
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6by flickr user spo0ky
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What was missing?
Individual vs group assignments Studio attendance, within-studio grading &
sharing Grading on a variety of assignment-specific
criteria Multimedia embedding support Open source solution
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How we did it in 2 weeks
Django! Python rapid application development
framework Python Imaging Library for some of the
thumbnail code O!oad the video hosting / sharing to Vimeo
& YouTube jQuery for front-end Javascript
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Django Background
Started in 2005 by a newspaper in Kansas Open source “The Framework for perfectionists with
deadlines” Key features
Clean Object-relational mapper (your Python classes become database tables)
Easy templating system Nice, clean URLs
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Object-relational mapping
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Rapid templates & forms
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Clean URL patterns
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The app
Demo Creating assignment Using markdown for formatting Embedding video from YouTube Grading a submission Viewing all submissions from a studio
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Lessons Learned
Planning ahead and doing the dev work over summer was critical
Students are opinionated and will have many “wants”; trick is to prioritize them
Your interface design does impact quality & tone of submissions
Likewise, if you make it easy for Teaching Assistants to provide feedback, they will
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Next Steps
Courseapp is available at http://hci.stanford.edu/research/courseapp/
Open Source SVN repository & trac for bug management Will be used in future design classes at
Stanford, and hopefully other schools Deploying for a di!erent class (CS294h) this
quarter took only 2 lines of changes
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Thanks!
Prof. Scott Klemmer for guidance Stanford CS dep’t for supporting the work Django project for letting us get this done
quickly Joel Brandt and Marcello Bastéa-Forte for
previous versions of course software that were inspirational
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