Almost ready for the summative evalution

This week I've been preparing for the summative evaluation of the automatically generated tutorials which come after the remix process. I've very happy with how far these tutorials come in such a short time span. But I do feel like there is a lot more work to be done. For the most part we have had success getting people mostly through the remix process. We added a real quick lesson on how to do the process by me walking them through an example. This really helped the process. The tutorials have gone very well this week too. I'm seeing very similar results with the on-request stencils that we saw two summers ago... which is reassuring. However lots of our users this time have been very hesitant to use the “Show Me” button. I think this might be due to some instructions I give but I'm not sure.

I think for these tutorials to work long term we are going to have to start producing only the set of transactions that are absolutely necessary from the AST transaction generation process. After that, the tutorial sub-system needs to be in charge of everything else. What I think this means is we need to not base the tutorials on transactions but some abstract representation in the presentation system. This will then allow us to insert all sorts of special tutorial steps. For example: we can have a user drop in a statement, play, then add it to a count loop, and then play. With such a system we can take each transaction and expand it as necessary based on our user. Which is more than we can do right now.