SpaceMiner
SpaceMiner is a tool to help beginner programming students learn JavaScript and programming concepts in face-to-face or remote environments, with peer collaboration and mentor/teacher assistance.
Questions we're trying to address
- How can a beginner get started quickly, and within one hour of coding for the first time produce a game that's:
- Fun
- Instructive
- Unique
- Playable at home once they leave
- Shareable with others once they leave
- And, easily resumable at home or next time
- How can we as mentors understand how well our tutorials and lessons are helping students make real progress?
- How can students help each other improve and collaborate?
- And, how can we hook them on "that old time agile" mindset?
Current use
Current features (all WIP!)
- Play worlds made by other students immediately without needing to login
- Create an account (without needing an email address)
- Fork and modify existing worlds and modify the world map and event handlers for collisions
- Step-by-step tutorials for learning JavaScript within the context of building a world
- Interactive lessons for improving understanding of concepts
- With questions to test knowledge
- Coding challenges before advancing
- Mentor / Teacher interactive dashboard to monitor class progress and understanding
- Ability to send a world into "Test" to get others to play it and leave feedback
- Ability to "release" a world into "Production" (and soon to get ratings and stastics about difficulty, average time per play, etc)
Planned features
- Multiple-player mode within a world
- Save world code into GitHub directly from the tool
- With ability to re-deploy previous versions of a world when desired
- Custom "plugins" via Quintus component model
- Support for creating Student Teams and Class Sessions to aid Mentor / Teacher dashboards for running multi-week sessions
- Support for intelligently pairing students with peers based on quiz scores and on peer-to-peer code reviews