update please

[Brian Cluff]

First off...to anyone currently working on anything for the project.. hans
forgot to mention that I already have Phase one most done (Sorry Nigel, I
hope you haven't done too much).
The concentration thus far has been on report generation since this is what
is majorly lacking in the software world for education.

> Well we know we need some sort of id mod. I'd think that a login would
> be the easiest and so far I've thought of three roles needed.
> - Student
> - Teacher
> - Admin
> Will need a CM mod to enter and edit the tests / courseware.

With the math that we are currently working on there needs to be an option
to both enter a test and have a test randomly generated.  Since this is
math, I envision lots of litle modules to cover every "Standard" that the
student is required to know (there are almost 300 of them for math, but one
modules can cover sevral standards).

> Report generator

This is done for the most part, although it could use a bit of tuning, but
that should be done within a day or so.

> Registration mod for adding new logins (suggest a way to do bulk
registration).


This definatly needs to be done, it will also need sevral modules for
importing data directly from the large attendance systems that schools will
be using.  I currently have a basic one that does tab delimited that has
worked for both Power School and Winschool, I don't know about SASI or any
of the others, that can probably export the same type of data, but being
able to just click update and have it do get it would be the best option for
keeping the current school attendees up to date.

> Creating the DB

This is mostly done... it will need to be extended to handle new modules,
but it covers all it needs to to handle answer keys, the actual answers,
student ID's, the standards and their categories... etc etc that it needs to
generate the reports.

> Designing the GUI

Lots to be done here.... but I imagine that it will fall into place as a
task gets done.
I would imagine if there is some sort of artist that we can tap into, that
would be awesome to give it more of an appeal to the younger kids.

> That's the task break down the way I see it now. My suggestions would be
> that we just throw a PHP tool together with MySQL on the back end. That

Thats exactly what I have it written in currently :)

> would be the fastest way with the thought that we're going to have to
> redo it so that we can use mulitlpe GUIs later. I think we should use
> SAX and XML for the content (not in the first iteration). it will give

We will need some sort of formula rendering engine that the formula can be
nicely represented in programs and the database.
We will also need a graphing engine as there is a lot of geomerty stuff in
the standards.
The hard coded tests might do well as XML depending on how we do them, but
right off the top of my head I can't see a whole lot of use for it.

> us more flexiblity.  Templates on the web GUI will make it easier for
> more schools to use it. If we are going to use the login format we need
> a way to look up lost passwds. But I think we only need the five teams I

We should be able to just do the good old "so you forgot your password...
well tell me what you want it to be, cause I can't tell you what it is"
method, I would seriously hope that the admins wouldn't loose their password
:)

> already talked about to start and get something useful out the door. I'd
> like to do it in Python (since I'm trying to learn it better). and since
> XMLDOM is too slow for this we need a SAX parser only all of my
> favorites are Java so does anyone know of a C++ or Python SAX parser?

Like hans said... NO JAVA... I hate that steaming crap of a language :)
Plus is not totally free.
(forgive my stupidity... but was is SAX... and can we use GUITAR instead...
we could avoid a lot of porn that way... but seriously, what is SAX?)

Anyway, I hope that helps a bit...  Hopefully I can go live with the
website/server that I have been putting together in the tiny amount of spare
 time that we I have.

Brian Cluff