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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