Re: New member

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.smileys.net>]

Jeffery Douglas Waddell wrote:
> I'm on it thank you Doug.  I've also cross posted to that list about this
> project.  Perhaps some cross pollination will do us all good.

I also cross-posted this one message, since this concerns differences
between the two groups.

> Don't know if we can keep the discussions separate or not, also we may not
> want to as there is really not much reason for the "edutainment" to be
> different from the classroom based applications.  I.E. the software should
> scale from 1 user to 1000's of user's with no difficulties.

Sadly, no. It is generally easier to add classroom-oriented features to
an individual learning application (for example, add simultaneous
players to a problem-solving game) than it is to trim back a
group-oriented program and make it work well for an individual.

There are really three different educational situations, and they all
work completely differently, in a social and educational sense, namely:
just-me, small-group and large-group (crowd). I would count small-group
as about 2 to 8 people. If you play online games, the difference in
character between Quake-ish games played in each of those three
situations should rapidly impress itself on you.

In a classroom (large-groupsetting it is possible to some degree to
simulate just-me and crowd and so make use of programs aimed at those
situations, but these programs also don't work very fluidly for the
class a whole, for example the group management facilities just aren't
there, and games such as patience are impractical past small-group size.

OTOH, the classroom-oriented programs (both in the computer and
social/educational sense) that I've seen generally scale down very
badly, particularly to a just-me setting, starting with little things
like all of the pointless extra options to show-stoppers like
multi-participant situations with no AI to "play" with or against. I-spy
is no fun by yourself.

So, I think that there is a bright in(ter)dependent future for both
approaches, to each their own, but each with an eye on the other's
situation for, as you put it, cross-pollination.