Project Tigr Development Journal— January

A couple of weeks ago I read a great article about only having one side project a year — and blogging about it monthly to make sure your goals are actually achieved. This year I want to make Project Tigr better and more useful to kids in schools and this will become my development journal.

What works so far?

The most vital element of project tigr allows students to walkthrough projects. We did a lot of research on how kids learned and published this post which details what we changed.

In short, kids (and adults) don’t really like to read through a massive document, so we split up projects into worksheets, and then further more into steps. Often worksheets have an open element in order to allow students to experiment and make their own things. For example, one project is to make an interactive emoji, a worksheet includes creating basic shapes such as a circle and square. The extended activity is to use a combination of polygons and circles to make their own emoji.

A secondary object was for students to also send us their work either at the end of a lesson, or whenever they complete something they think is of worth. This enables us to see what they’re doing, but also ask them how they think their doing, whether there is anything we can do to improve. There is also a box for them to write down if they have any questions, which is useful to track if a lot of people get stuck on the same thing (svg paths!).

Until now, communication has been one direction — students can send their work to me, but there was no way for me to reply outside of traditional class time. January, I started a new job in London which has meant leaving all the kids I’ve been teaching mostly stranded in Bath. I wanted to get simple communication built into project tigr before school started, but I got too busy with moving house :(

January goal

So my goal for this month is to build the simple communication platform, enabling students and myself to talk. Initially, I want to make it as simple as possible, in that there is a box for students to ask questions, or paste links to their work, and I can equally respond with text or links. Eventually, I’d like to allow them to upload files or pictures, but I’m not sure how to manage that side yet.

In order to allow communication, I need to get students to sign up so I know who I’m talking to. This means I need to build a signup, login, and forgot password page. I should also add in a profile page so students can update their information. Maybe even let them provide their own code for an emoji?

Future goals

I also have a *lot* of things I want to add for the rest of this year:

• a showcase of work submitted (maybe students have to specially submit to it?)
• specific little challenges students can work on, e.g. when star wars came out maybe we could have run a challenge to make star wars emojis in December.
• Gamify this experience, students can win points for work that’s approved onto the showcase, more points for the higher complexity etc.
• A teacher dashboard, so students aren’t *just* assigned to communicate with me. But I don’t really know how to handle the security around this bit yet.
• Re-writing where the markdown files are — currently GitHub rate limits the gist embed, which causes real problems in a classroom environment with 30 kids all accessing the same file.
• Better analytics to better learn how people are using the platform and which bits need to work better. This is probably a lot more important now that I live over 100 miles away from my students.

It should be an exciting year!