We’ve spent quite a bit of time lately to prepare a presentation for our teachers on Tutorius. Not all of them were having a technical background, so we did a couple of diagrams to make sure everybody understood our Technical Holy Trinity : the Interactive Tutor, the Tutorial Edition Activity and the Community Web Site. The web site itself is having a lot of data on this already, so we’ll just go ahead and give you the eye-candy!
Step 1 : The Interactive Tutor
The first step in promoting the usage of Tutorius will be to have teachers, developers and enthusiasts generate ideas and content for the platform. In order to enable these people to insert their tutoring ideas in Tutorius, we will be creating a Tutorial Editor. This will be a Sugar Activity that will enable one of these creators to generate a tutorial. You will be able to connect blocks to create a list of steps that the student must go through in order to learn what you want to show them, and you will be able to specify actions to take at each of these steps (display a texte bubble, change the color of an interface element, etc…). The goal of the Tutorial Editor is to make it extremely easy to create new tutorials.
Step 2 : Sharing on the Web Site
The second step is to browse the Community Web Site to fetch the latest and greatest tutorials that were made around the world. The web site will be featuring a list of the most popular tutorials, as well as a classification of the tutorials according to the various topics. Students will be able to select this content on the web and to install it on their own version of Sugar. We do not plan to make the Community Web Site mandatory to share tutorials; we wish to make it so that teachers creating their tutorials can share them via mesh network with their student. The brightest side of the Community Web Site is that the best content will be widely available.
Step 3 : Interactive Tutor
The third and final step is to have the Interactive Tutor guide the user in a variety of topics. The tutor pops up explanation text bubbles, highlights important sections of the interface and generally makes the life of the student easier with his programmed brain from a teacher. We’d like the tutor to be able to suggest new tutorials to the student, based on his actions and knowledge. Is the student hitting the backspace key a lot? Perhaps he would like to know about the Typing Activity! Or perhaps the student just finished a tutorial on turning text bold? Perhaps he’d like to know more about doing italic! The possibilities are endless.
Our current development goals are to create a basic version of the Interactive Tutor, then begin right away the construction of the Tutorial Editor. These two components will be the main focus of our next two months, and we wish to release on a monthly basis. So I encourage you to get access to the source code of the tutorius_toolkit branch and give a look at the first version we made in the /tutorius/source/activities/Writus.Activity folder! We’ll be releasing further architecture details soon.
Stay tuned!