The NC PD cohort requested some common vocabulary terms for the course. Nate is also working on an authoritative BJC glossary that will be held at bjc.berkeley.edu. If we do a good job on this one, we can kill two birds with one stone.

Is there any documentation for how to write a lab, or resources for getting started with code and building the lab site?

Most of it looks pretty straight-forward, but it would be great to have some docs to help getting started, hopefully covering things like style and conventions. This could really help as we get others involved in working on updating labs.

Should we replace existing files or add new ones and change links?

We probably need to create a google docs folder to keep track of all of the documents created during PD.

This page uses the if block without much intro to how it works.
http://bjc.eecs.berkeley.edu/bjc-r/cur/programming/intro/drawing/game-of-tag.html?topic=berkeley_bjc/intro/broadcast-animations-music.topic&step=11

And the quiz is based off repeat blocks without showing how they work: http://bjc.berkeley.edu/bjc-r/cur/programming/intro/drawing/testkeypress-soln.html

This is mainly for CS10, but we need to make sure the new mobile apps section gets moved from Piazza to lab content.

We need 100 secure exam questions covering the course content in order to pilot the course in NC.

http://bjc.eecs.berkeley.edu/bjc-r/cur/programming/intro/drawing/turning.html?topic=berkeley_bjc/intro/loops-variables-conditionals.topic&step=2&novideo=true&noreading=true

The submit button is not readable. On click, you can see it but otherwise it looks like an empty box. I am using Chrome.

I've been experimenting with hosting the labs from other domains / locations.

There's two issues, one easy and one more tricky.

1. The "rootUrl" needs to be changed, but this is only two locations.
2. The real big issue is that in many place in *.topic files, URLs start with "/bjc-r"

Would it make sense to make these URLs more relative? I wouldn't do the whole repo at once but it could be something that's done in a few chunks.

Go over the elements that make games run, such as how the main loop is constantly polling for information related to keypresses, how the game draws a new frame at least 30 times a second, and so on.

/bjc-r/cur/programming/intro/snap/diffways.html?topic=berkeley_bjc/intro/broadcast-animations-music.topic&step=8

Nothing happens for me, or for students, when I click the "Submit" button at the bottom of lab.

(michael -- I'm assigning you to this so we don't step on eachothers toes... tell me if you don't want to tackle it)

We're basically done with topic 1, but there are three activities in topic 2 that need to be converted:

• test yourself: total turning
• test yourself: repeat
• if: what would you expect

Use the layout in the two quizzes in topic 1 to help! You are going to need to convert to multiple choice, since that is currently the only kind of assessment item we have. Other types coming soon!

I was going the quiz in lab 2 and when I hit submit, I didn't have a way to go forward in lab. I could only use the back button to get the page where I could answer.
http://bjc.eecs.berkeley.edu/bjc-r/cur/programming/intro/drawing/turning-soln.html

A journal component to the course would be very helpful for helping students internalize why they would want to go into computing, while also thinking about the approaches they use to solve problems and how they change as they become more experienced.

@tmbarnes says she will spearhead such a development.

We probably shouldn't keep the HW specs in labs for CS10.

Is there no URL parameter?
In this case, we should probably simply start to make a new course for CS10 out of existing topic files.

This would be a longer from project, but what do you guys think of the possibility of using a markdown processor? It could make the process of writing and updating labs much quicker in the future, and easier for others to submit and find fixes.

@lpkeller needs to update some lab information for her version of the course on NC State's moodle.

• Lab 5's source code doesn't match up with the lab write-up. Either resources need to be changed, or it needs to be made explicit that the code will not match for pedagogical reasons (ie, code literacy is a learning objective)
• "Try It" exercises need to be added to the unit on Lists.
• Add some algorithms to the noodle

The current set of labs has lecture videos embedded within each lab. Should these be removed for students who are taking the class in person?

It's not strictly necessary, but might be worth considering.

Currently, I've only been pushing to GH to test my changes. Can I setup a server locally?

• Multiple Choice Questions (to be used for NC practice tests, but not sensitive info)
• Short Answer questions based on CSP Free Response Questions

The NC teachers will be submitting their solutions to the BJC labs to @lpkeller's Moodle hosted by NC State. These need to be graded by the end of the PD session.

the links in .topic files shouldn't need to start with /bjc-r/, but that should be prepended by topic.js using the 'rootURL' global.

Need to make this conditional for now, so that existing .topic file links that have the 'bjc-r' prepended don't break

Currently, unless I'm missing something, there's no way to jump to the list of all labs for a course.

For instance, on this page (mid lab 2):
http://bjc.berkeley.edu/bjc-r/cur/programming/variables/nested-for.html?topic=berkeley_bjc/intro/loops-variables-conditionals.topic&step=11
I can jump to the main lab 2 page:
http://bjc.berkeley.edu/bjc-r/topic/topic.html?topic=berkeley_bjc/intro/loops-variables-conditionals.topic
But It would be very handy to have an easy way to jump to all labs pages, here:
http://bjc.berkeley.edu/bjc-r/course/berkeley_bjc.html

Is there any reason to have hard coded properties in /every/ /single/ tag for images? There are way too many places right now that have Snap! Images which are squished in some dimension because their properties are different from BYOB.

If no one has any objections, I think it would be good to run the following regex over the /bjc-r folder for .html files
(width|height|vspace|hspace)="\d"\s+

On my system it finds 2,268 matches all of which are contained in <img /> so it would seem relatively safe to proceed. I'm going to test with a test branch shortly...

We need to outline:

• How teachers can use the resources in this repo
• How teachers can make their own copies of the repo and host them on github.io
• How teachers can push their changes upstream
• How to use the issue tracker for the technical team

We should really try to add credits to all images, if they aren't our own. (There aren't too many, but there are a few).

What would be the best place to have a consistent spot for credits?
The two options I can think of:

• Below and image (small text, aligned on the right of the image)
• At the bottom of the page,

The framework file declares an i as a global variable. I had one group try using a for loop. Needless to say, the for loop failed miserably. The i doesn't seem to be used and should be removed.

http://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html#open:http://www.corsproxy.com/inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs10/labs/prog/algorithms/algorithms-framework.xml

Take a look at this screenshot.

In order to properly do reflections about the X/Y axis there needs to be some intro to the operators palette and all the math blocks.

A student pointed out to me today that the solution for the Acronym block in Lab 5 (as shown here: http://tinyurl.com/BJCAcron) will include symbols such as '-', '+', etc. So for example, if you're phrase was "Beauty and Joy of + Computing", the block would return "BJ+C". Is this the desired effect? If not, the solution needs to be changed

http://bjc.eecs.berkeley.edu/bjc-r/cur/programming/intro/snap/intro-play.html?topic=berkeley_bjc/intro/broadcast-animations-music.topic&step=6

The "Hint" at the bottom includes a scratch image. It needs to be replaced with a Snap! image.

These comments are from a TA this semester, and I think they're good things to keep in mind as we work on updating labs.

Length

This is a big one. Very few of my students got past making an acronym/finding the longest word of the sentence, which means that they are never getting to the last three pages of the lab. So the complexity and number of activities might be something that the lab team wants to reexamine. Particularly there are what I think of as points of congestion which might be altered to make the lab more viable.

Pluralizing noun phrases part of the time

One of the exercises asks the students to write a block that pluralizes a phrase half of the times you run it. This is fine, except that we have been drilling into them the definition of a function, i.e. that it always returns the same thing. Many of them are at a loss as to how to make a block sometimes return one thing and sometimes another, and things like state and random variables are foreign to them. This meant alot of time was spent on a small and conceptually pretty unimportant task. Giving them more direction for this exercise would go a long way towards clearing up one of the points of congestion

Combine (Is the first letter of the word a vowel)

So, Jon mentioned this in an email all it's own and frankly it deserved one. This was hugely hard for students to grasp and it was a big hurdle for them to get past and one that often left them much more frustrated than curious or intrigued. More than anything, the order of the "vowels" list and the "letter 1 of word" confused them, even though the block makes it explicit which input must be a list. Something needs to be done to help give learners the intuition for making the logical leap to "Oh, does this this list of vowels contain the first letter".

Some students had issues imagining the list "a, e, i, o, u" containing the first letter of a word, because obviously the word contained the letter, not the list! As in they didn't get that like, the list containing an equivalent letter was what they were looking for. This really needs to be reworded somehow

Unicode

This was a less common issue, but for the acronym finder, many students had trouble with making the connection between unicode and capital/lowercase letters. The lab just says "experiment with the unicode block", and many students seemed not to know what that meant, which stalled out a few pairs.

Setting variables

This is a small one, but students regularly did not realize for the first "noun phrase" exercise that they needed to actually like run the set blocks. They would set them up to set the variable to the right thing, but never actually run them, then express confusion when references to those variables did nothing. This might be something an extra sentence in the lab description might alleviate.

Anyway this is just what I noticed and I encourage people to chime in with things that they notice - I feel like it is useful to have this stuff sitting around for future reference.

http://bjc.berkeley.edu/bjc-r/cur/programming/intro/drawing/testkeypress.html?topic=berkeley_bjc/intro/broadcast-animations-music.topic&step=10&novideo=true&noreading=true&nohomework=true

has not been converted to the proper quiz format.

This can be done beyond Github - teachers need to know that they are not teaching all alone. We need to help teachers come up with protocols and resources so that teachers will seek help from one another and from the technical staff on top of BJC.

Can we switch to HTML 5 doctypes? Not too much specific need for a change now, but it's always good to try to follow standards. :)

We should try removing these from production.

Perhaps, we could create a simple error / debug function to use, which only runs when the base URL is "localhost"

We need to work with the Berkeley TAs by giving them access to @lpkeller's Moodle, the NC Cohort Piazza, and so on, so that our teachers can reach out to them for assistance.

This is known, but I'm adding it as an issue so we can track progress.

The lab page for "When you really have to loop"
Says this:
"Why two different ways? Well, Brian likes the empty input slot, so it works the same as map and friends, but Dan likes the variable."

We probably shouldn't refer to people specifically since it just doesn't make sense if you don't know who Brian or Dan is.

We need a clear description of what goes in the portfolio, how it will be graded, what the individual pieces must look like, etc, etc. There should also be resources on how teams should be organized, using roles, responsibilities, and so forth.

The final project must contain three components: code, data, and internet. The Data section is particularly in need of work.

/bjc-r/cur/programming/intro/drawing/testkeypress.html?topic=berkeley_bjc/intro/broadcast-animations-music.topic&step=12

This quiz has all scratch images. I can work on it later tonight, probably.

@tmbarnes says she will develop a lesson/lecture on OOP, probably using GameMaker.

The lab instructs students to use the for loop but doesn't show where to get it.http://bjc.eecs.berkeley.edu/bjc-r/cur/programming/variables/for.html?topic=berkeley_bjc/intro/loops-variables-conditionals.topic&step=6&novideo=true&noreading=true

Example from Lab 1:
http://bjc.berkeley.edu/bjc-r/cur/programming/intro/drawing/testkeypress.html?topic=berkeley_bjc/intro/broadcast-animations-music.topic&step=10&novideo=true&noreading=true&nohomework=true

has not been converted to the proper quiz format.

I think we should have a reference lab, that goes over some basics of Snap!

Stuff it could cover:

• Creating Accounts
• Different Saving Options
• Importing Tools and Libraries
• Open vs Import
• Where to find help (This should probably be added to the first lab as well).
• Running a block (All the places you can click)

Perhaps we should add it to the first

Just completing Labs 1 - 3 is not enough prerequisite knowledge and practice to complete HW1. A large amount of students do not understand to use For loops for HW1.

Is this intended for BJC High School courses?

Do we have a way of keeping track of lab solutions?

If not could we create a folder (or separate repo)? I'm not sure how public we want them to be? Currently all BYOB labs have publicly available solutions.