Making Progess with Rev

[Wilhelm Sanke]

On Mon Dec 3, 2007, Randy Hengst iowahengst at mac.com wrote:

> Len, a puzzle I made of the contiguous US, I included a "hint" button  
> that would show the outlines of the states. I'll do something along  
> those lines for regions version. I also plan to create a puzzle for  
> each of the 5 regions as organized in my son's social studies text.  
> When completed, the opening screen will be a US map with each region  
> shaded. The user will click the region to practice. So, it will be  
> more obvious that the puzzle is for only one region.
>
> I like your idea to add the star for the capital name in the matching  
> game. My context for this specific version was my son's needs. He  
> knew the names of the states, but not the postal abbreviations or  
> capitals. So, he recognized that the capital name wasn't a state when  
> he began.



Geography is a field that is very suitable for producing educational 
stacks, both because of the graphical elements in such exercises and the 
possibilty to implement fundamental principles of learning - as can be 
seen in your stack.

Incidentally - and for the same reasons - there are three such stacks 
available from my website,

page <http://www.sanke.org/MetaMedia/StudentStacks-eng.htm>

produced some time ago by teacher students during multimedia workshops - 
at a time when we still had the wonderful situation to use free Starter 
Kit versions  of Metacard and Revolution, which were only "restricted" 
by a 10-line script limit, which, however, could easily be overcome in 
the case of beginning programmers. Meaning: Such beginning programmers 
tend to produce simpler programs.

Since such free Starter Kits have been no longer available as a 
wonderful basis to teach educational programming we have abandoned most 
of such efforts, and now use Revolution mainly with small groups of 
faculty, e.g. for the development of software applied in the 
foreign-language deparments.

Anyway, the student stacks on my website might be indeed interesting in 
the way they deal with the ten-line script limit, but also because of 
some creative elements in them. On the other side they can also contain  
some basic deficiencies one should avoid by all means in educational 
programming, such as the fixed order of the sequence of maps and their 
corresponding state names in the first exercise of the "German States" 
stack; the other exercises of this stack are better and more flexibly 
programmed.

Two of the geographical stacks on the "Student Samples" page have a 
entirely German surface, which would make it difficult for a speaker not 
familiar with German to navigate and understand what is going on in the 
stack.
This holds for the "Europe" stack, which might otherwise be interesting 
because of its ample integration of images and sound, and for the German 
version of "German States".

Fortunately there is also an English version of the "German States" 
stack with four exercises, of which all scripts are accessible.-


Best regards,

Wilhelm Sanke
<http://www.sanke.org/MetaMedia>