IO2 | The Web-Portal

The web-portal is the core-side of Colette, providing the teacher with an environment to create tasks from generic task families and paths (a sequence of tasks).

The current version of the web-portal is a sandbox, so a beta-version. You can access this version following this link.

The welcome-page:

You are greated with a nice overview of our project:

This is the starting page of the portal.

The first tab “Manage your Paths” does lead to a page where you can create, edit and delete paths as well as tasks. Here you can also find an overview of the task families which have been implemented as well as tasks that have been already created by users.

Under the second tab “Published Paths” you can browse the data-base.

The last tab “Learn more about CT” is the link to our handbook or manual. This will be added later on. Here you will find a description of the portal and how it works including a quick introduction to get started right away with using the portal. You will also find an introduction to “Computational Thinking” the concept underlying our project.

Creating a Path

So, let’s talk about creating a path. Therefore we click on “Manage your Paths” and create a new one.

We can give the Path a name and a description and on the left side we can add a task. At the moment there are two task families included in the portal. One is Building Cubes, using the library a-frame and Blockly. You will be able to code the placement of cubes to create a certain, given shape.

The other task family is called “Reconstruction”. In this task family you reconstruct a function giving certain points in the coordinate system. These points can be very simply chosen: Just to have a simple function reconstruction. Another version is to set different selectable points to the given coordinates, so some you would have to avoid, others you would have to hit. The task is then to give a function which would collect the most points. At the moment this task family has been developed as a proof-of-concept, showing that the connection from our portal to Cindy JS is possible and can be used further.

We choose to add a task stemming from the task family “Building Cubes” to our path.

We then can choose which scenario we would like to have:

Then we do even have further possibilities to choose from a library of different settings:

In this way we create our custom task stemming from the task family.

In the end the task contains a screenshot copied from the editable preview on the upper right part of the screen, it contains editable hints that you can either edit or delete entirely as well as a problem definition.

This specific task then can be included in our path and saved to the database from where the student can get the information using his smartphone and the app.