[MWForum]RE: OWL and MIA

[Wendy Petti]

Craig, may I answer your question on behalf of Daniel and Chris Myers and
myself?

OWL (OpenWorld Learning) is a small educational nonprofit organization in
Colorado.  Daniel is the webmaster and I am the Director of Curriculum.
Chris Myers is the executive director who hired both of us.  Daniel lives
in Ecuador and I live in Maryland and we both work long-distance for OWL.
I've made a few trips to the OWL computer labs in Denver, but none of us
has ever met Daniel.

I think you must be referring to OWL's MicroWorlds in Action website, yes?
http://mia.openworldlearning.org

MIA was Chris's brainchild, and Daniel and I brought his idea to life.  A
little more than two years ago, I asked on the LogoForum if anyone would be
interested in helping me create a website of materials to help teach
teachers and students how to use MicroWorlds.  Chris contacted me and asked
me if I would create the site with OWL's backing and the help of Daniel's
awesome computer skills, customizing the site to meet the needs of OWL's
teachers and students.  I was happy to come on board.

It was Chris's idea to have an online project library with thematic folders
containing related projects of increasing difficulty.  He wanted even
beginners to be able to work through projects without getting frustrated,
and that is why each folder is broken up into a sequence of projects; a
user can dabble in all of the "easy" projects, jumping from folder to
folder, or can work through progressively more complex projects within each
folder.  It was also Chris's idea to have three types of extension
activities accompanying each project.  The three of us together over a
period of some months gradually agreed on the interface for each folder and
each project.  It was a bit complicated since we had decided to provide two
versions of each project:  one with a screenshot and one with an
interactive MW project.  I'm pretty sure it was Chris's idea to indicate
the approximate difficulty of each project using the symbols found at ski
resorts.  We also agreed to have a resources section, including "How do I?"
questions and some sort of search capability or vocabulary table/index.

Chris pretty closely monitored our work on the first one or two folders,
and after that he left it up to Daniel and me to continue building the
site.  I have created pretty much all of the content and graphics for the
site - with some helpful input from Daniel on some of the trickier code and
explanations - and Daniel has done all of the work in turning the materials
into a website.  It is pretty amazing, in my opinion, what he has developed
behind the scenes.  I send him a MicroWorlds project which contains, on the
procedures page, not just the procedures but also a list of vocabulary
words, project notes, and extension questions.  Daniel has created some
sort of code that takes this information and automatically turns it into a
web page.  I think he has also automated the process of creating the image
of the project map, although I'm not quite sure about that.  He has written
a program that automatically builds the web page as the user accesses it.
And I'm pretty sure that the main page for each folder is created
on-the-spot each time a user accesses a new folder.  It automatically
creates all of the folder tabs, and the colored border around the listing
of projects and sample screenshot, and the difficulty level symbols, and so
on.  As I understand it, the shapes pages are also created automatically
from a program Daniel wrote.

Daniel also obtained permission from LCSI to use the vocabulary information
from the MWPro help section and wrote a program that automatically created
the printable hyperlinked vocabulary table in the resources section.  (The
MWPro vocabulary cannot be printed except perhaps one primitive at a time,
but MIA's vocabulary table provides a concise summary of all of the MW
primitives with definitions, sample code, and where the primitives have
been used so far on the MIA site.)

What also amazes me is that Daniel is using a very very very old computer a
nd a very very very slow Internet connection from Ecuador.  But he has also
developed an incredibly sophisticated database program to track the
progress of hundreds of students using OWL's computer labs, and he can
create beautiful, informative reports from this data.

I only work part-time for OWL and I've been involved with quite a few
offline activities on OWL's behalf too, so progress in building the
MicroWorlds in Action website has been rather slow, since I take my jolly
time about creating new materials!  I'm very happy with the new "How Do I?"
section, and we plan to add lots and lots of additional questions in the
coming months.  We would be very happy to include your questions in that
section, so ask away!!

While MicroWorlds in Action has been designed with OWL's teachers and
students in mind, it was very important to me that we provide a website of
materials that would be useful and accessible to MicroWorlds users
everywhere.  So even though there are in existence some offline OWL
materials for the exclusive use of OWL's teachers and students, the MIA
website is OWL's gift to the worldwide MicroWorlds community.  We hope you
find it useful, and we certainly welcome your suggestions and ideas for
future developments.

And (sigh) one of these days we will probably begin adapting the site to
take into consideration the brand new version of MicroWorlds, MW Ex!

Oh, by the way, MIA's silly home page with the turtle in a pond full of
rocks was meant to be temporary until a professional web designer or
graphics artist could render a more polished home page that was more
compatible with OWL's home site (at www.openworldlearning.org ) but over
time I think my silly drawing has sort of grown on us, and maybe we will
just let our little turtle keep his pond!

Wendy Petti
OWL's Director of Curriculum
and MIA's content developer
http://mia.openworldlearning.org
also creator of Math Cats (which has a MicroWorlds section)
http://www.mathcats.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: mwforum-admin@lists.mathcats.com
> [mailto:mwforum-admin@lists.mathcats.com]On Behalf Of cy
> Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 6:01 PM
> To: mwforum@lists.mathcats.com
> Subject: [MWForum]Thanks, Daniel
>
...
>
> By the way, I just recently discovered OWL online. What a
> fantastic resource
> for teachers. I really appreciate the work that has been done
> and the style
> in which the information is shared. What is your role in OWL?
>
> Craig
>