Suggested change to UI layout now that 'SCoop' is here

taweili / ardublock

ArduBlock is a Block Programming Language for Arduino.

GNU General Public License v3.0

414 stars 292 forks source link

Suggested change to UI layout now that 'SCoop' is here #103

Open TonyCallear opened 10 years ago

TonyCallear commented 10 years ago

Main suggestions...

The word ‘Scoop’ is not in the user interface – It doesn’t mean anything technical to the sort of students I have. Scoop is also a common English word, confusingly irrelevant to what it does on the arduino
The ‘Control’ draw now only contains blocks that control the flow of the program – conditional branching, repeat loops, subroutine calls and different kinds of delay/sleep functions. Delay/sleep functions are renamed to indicate their scope.
A ‘Tasks’ draw contains everything that can create an independent task – and the “define subroutine” block, which may not be logical but does seem natural. The MAIN task is slightly distinguished in color from ‘MultiTasks’.
A little tidy up of whether a ‘commands’ socket is a loop or not.

Example images tt01 tt02

The "independant flashing LED" program ends up looking like this...

tt03

...

taweili commented 10 years ago

Scoop release is not supposed to be final. Just a preview for the community who may want to try it.

The rearrange makes sense but we now have to deal with legacy. there are many tutorials based on the current version and it's probably best not to change too much.

TonyCallear commented 10 years ago

Agreed. But what to do? There must be some route to change the UI? I can’t think of anything less radical that also makes sense in the long term. I'm sure someone else can.

Perhaps…

Keep the “Control” draw exactly as it looks now for current tutorials, people just not interested in multitasking and functions incompatible with multitasking (I’m looking at some suspend/lowPower state blocks).
Add “Tasks” and “Task Control” draws with many of the same functions but organized more logically for people who do use multitasking.

Whatever the change it would be very useful to try it out with users new to ardublock and really test what works best. I cannot do that for a few weeks (it’s nearly school summer holidays over here in the UK).

TonyCallear commented 10 years ago

For what it is worth… a very quick test with a couple of students who tried out the scoop interface using switches and LEDs

They found the “Task” and “Pin Event” driven programming easy to understand and use.

Except… At first they didn’t understand the need to have a “Main Task” in the program. When they did understand, they didn’t like it – they just wanted to pull out a “Task” and have things work.

TonyCallear commented 9 years ago

I'll be trying something like this new layout with students again soon. Any suggestions to make it clearer? I'd be happy to get some new ideas.

taweili commented 9 years ago

Love to hear idea about making the US better.

Sent from my iPhone 6 Plus

On Nov 23, 2014, at 5:30 AM, TonyCallear notifications@github.com wrote:

I'll be trying something like this new layout with students again soon. Any suggestions to make it clearer? I'd be happy to get some new ideas.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

TonyCallear commented 9 years ago

Thank you for the interest.

My branch TC-Highclare is my best effort at the minute. I have moved schools this year and have not had a chance to really try this with students.

I'm setting up a Design and Technology course from nothing and I have to get more basic things working before I can think about giving this a proper test.

Maybe in six weeks or so?

taweili commented 9 years ago

SCoop was there for technical test. I agree that we need more common language to describe them and maybe a few event driven blocks to matching them better with common design language. ;)