Advanced: creating a classroom specific lobby where students can jump into a match.

[petergault]

Issue by RyanNovas Saturday Jun 07, 2014 at 16:29 GMT Originally opened as https://github.com/empirical-org/Quill-Writer-Archive/issues/12

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Ux options:

1. Teacher assigns student pairs.
2. Students are randomly assigned pairs.
3. Students create rooms and choose who to play with.

[petergault]

Comment by spacez320 Monday Jun 16, 2014 at 22:47 GMT

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Bringing in some writing from the post-meeting notes.

We can pair students together through a shared secret key. We could also generate a random key for each classroom. There are three different options for pairing students together:

1) Students self-select which classrooms they enter.

Students from a classroom are given a lobby, and the students create their own rooms, and other students join those rooms.

2) Students are randomly assigned rooms.

For each group of students assigned a lesson, we automatically create pairs of students when the lesson is assigned, and each student group is given its own room. In this sense, we skip the lobby.

3) Teacher assigns pairs of students.

From this interface, a teacher would be presented with a list of students, and the teacher would use some sort of drag and drop interface to create pairs of students (on the compass side). This would then generate the Room ID for each pair of students. This is an unlikely option as it introduces a significant amount of work for teachers.

Right now, option #2 seems like the best option as it takes the most friction out of the process. However, I have not yet made a decision on this topic, and I will make it a top priority to talk to teachers and get feedback on this question. What seems most likely is that for younger students, students should be randomly paired. Students that are older can handle the responsibility of selecting rooms.

[petergault]

Comment by spacez320 Monday Jun 16, 2014 at 22:48 GMT

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Is this issue to decide which one to do, or to implement it, or both? Are there use cases for more than one, or each one (i.e., should we plan on implementing >1 of these options)?

[petergault]

Comment by RyanNovas Thursday Jun 19, 2014 at 15:30 GMT

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Right now we are thinking that students should enter the game lobby, and then be paired up with the person who joined immediately before or after them. This would be on the Stories with Friends side rather than Compass.

By putting it on Stories with Friends, we help ensure that the users and their assigned partners are ready to go in the activity. Whereas, if we did it with Compass, they may be paired up with someone who will never join.

[petergault]

Comment by spacez320 Thursday Jun 19, 2014 at 16:05 GMT

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Race conditions intensifies.

Ryan Novas notifications@github.com wrote:

Right now we are thinking that students should enter the game lobby, and then be paired up with the person who joined immediately before or after them. This would be on the Stories with Friends side rather than Compass.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/empirical-org/Stories-With-Friends/issues/12#issuecomment-46575786

[petergault]

Comment by RyanNovas Thursday Jun 19, 2014 at 16:11 GMT

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We're going to send out an email soon going into more detail on all of this.

On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 12:05 PM, Matthew Coleman notifications@github.com wrote:

Race conditions intensifies.

Ryan Novas notifications@github.com wrote:

Right now we are thinking that students should enter the game lobby, and then be paired up with the person who joined immediately before or after them. This would be on the Stories with Friends side rather than Compass.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:

https://github.com/empirical-org/Stories-With-Friends/issues/12#issuecomment-46575786

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/empirical-org/Stories-With-Friends/issues/12#issuecomment-46580694 .

Ryan Novas Chief Operations Officer

Quill: Interactive Grammar Learn English grammar by writing sentences and proofreading passages. http://quill.org

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[petergault]

Comment by petergault Monday Sep 08, 2014 at 17:49 GMT

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Here are details on how the matching will work:

https://moqups.com/gault8121/tv6POeNa/p:a76dbc644

Empirical Core 2 Player Matching Logic

1. From the student profile, all links to activities don't actually link to the activity, but rather link to the Quill writer lobby.
2. From the lobby we tell students we are looking for a partner from the class. We reach out to see if anyone else is also in the classroom lobby.
3. Wait for 30 seconds. During this time, show something interesting? We could ask students to read a passage or something.
4. If we cannot find a match after 30 seconds, fall back to loading the activity as a single player experience.
5. When a pair is matched, compare all open activities against what is most recently assigned. The key note here is figuring out which is the top assignment. At the moment we use due dates, and that creates an order. However, we may remove due dates, as they are not popular. We need to preserve the order, either by keeping the due date function ( which is somewhat unpopular) or by creating a ranking based on the order it was assigned. The short story here is that all of the assigned quill activities have an order, so #1 quill activity is at the top, #10 is at the bottom.
6. Compare the list of top most assignments and assign the overlapping activity. If there is no overlap, randomly select one student and then choose the top activity for that student.
7. If we choose a new activity for the student, tell the student that you are actually going to do "xxxx assignment" (tell them they aren't doing the one they clicked on).
8. Create Sid and UID for students at this point (not earlier) and pass the URL to quill writer.

[wlaurance]

This works but we aren't using it right now. We should revisit this for the quill integration.