[Edu-sig] Learning Python via a browser: looking for a name

[Michael Tobis]

We are thinking very much along the same lines in terms of the
experience we intend to provide to the student.

Your efforts are somewhat orthogonal to my preliminary goal of having
secure doctests that are verified on the server but run on the client.
I think we should coordinate so that our efforts can cooperate. I
think these goals are not competing; the didactic doctests and the
authentication doctests serve different purposes.

A well-designed interactive tutorial environment is something we all
want, and I encourage your efforts in this direction. The crucial
issue, I think, in the success of such a project is ease of
deployment. The student must have either an egg to hatch or a web page
to visit.

However, I am surprised to find myself inclined to the specialized
client rather than the web solution. (The "rich client" or "iTunes"
model)

The server must either be 1) very easy to install (the skills at a
typical school are shockingly low) or 2) low maintenance and highly
scalable (so that skilled volunteer efforts would be sufficient.
Either of these approaches becomes more difficult as the graphics load
is moved to the server.

A localhost solution is not going to be deployable at all, I'm afraid.
We will never have the tech support resources to get webservers
installed on every student's computer.

I guess this means you do need to address the sandbox question, which
in turn puts quite acomputational load on the server and a time and
skills demand on the sysadmin. Then if you do server side greaphics
rendering, you will have a hard time getting satsifactory performance,
unless there is *serious* infrastructure funding. It also assumes that
the student has reliable broadband.

So for scalability, deployment, and support as well as security, I
think computations should be done on the client, and the end user
should not be required to run a localhost server.

When I first started thinking along these lines I expected a browser
and a webserver would be part of the design, but I now am inclined to
doubt it.

mt