Improving the tutorial experience

I've been working on testing the automatically generated tutorials at the science center. I've been testing whether if I remove some steps in the tutorial if it helps the user's experience. While I haven't gotten a lot of users to test this with, I can say that I think this makes a big difference. This isn't really surprising given that the tutorials are quite repetitive and long, especially since they are automatically generated. I'm now working to start adding explanations to the tutorials for the concepts. In order to do this I'm having to add in message only steps in the tutorial, which isn't easy. Once this support is in, I'm going to try and start tailor each tutorial to some particular concept. To do this I'm going to simply fast forward through steps that aren't related to the current topic. I also need to add re-ordering in the tutorial to teach the concept. This is going to be very hard, even to hack, in the current code... so I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do this, but I think it is going to be necessary if I'm going to get meaningful results. I also want to use this opportunity to revisit the initial experience of the tutorials for users. This has caused lots of problems in my last study and currently at the Science Center. The kids simply do not understand that they are in a tutorial to add the remixed action. I have a sketch of this from a while back that I'm going to get in shortly because I think I can get another 5 minutes out of users during testing if this goes in sooner rather than later. I also need to improve the on-request stencils feedback. This should be easy too. I'm going to flash/glow outlines around objects that would help them after they have tried an action unsuccessfully several times. I also want to improve the feedback for an incorrect mouse click. I don't have any ideas for this yet... but I know that the more I utilize the Science Center the faster the ideas and their solutions will come. In other news... the kids are no longer having problem naming methods in Looking Glass anymore! The thanks for this goes to Dennis for removing the Java naming constraints in Looking Glass.