Andrew's Results
Student: 23, Male, 1st-year Maths PhD
Qualitative Data
The student had not used Second life before. He had some basic previous experience using Logo when he was at school in America, but was not aware that you could get a physical turtle robot.
He had very little previous coding experience, having dabbled many years ago with Visual Basic, Basic and QBasic. He attempted and completed each exercise in turn, only struggling with the pyramid, though initially he was not keen to use the penup and pendown functions. Since access to the 2D version was not available at the time, all exercise were run using the Second Life turtle.
He found the turtle a good introduction to procedural programming but got bored quickly. He had a lot of difficulty grasping the left roll and right roll functions and their use.
He started with the initial shapes and very quickly progressed. On the six-pointed star, he found a way of drawing it without lifting the pen or crossing over an already drawn line.
When he got to the exercises which could potentially use stored procedures, he attempted them individually and then tried again with the stored procedures. He found the square particularly difficult in this regard, though he did try to use several of them (e.g. fwd 5, right 90; call 4 sqr; rroll 90; call 4 sqr; fwd 5; down 90; call 4 sqr etc.).
He found that it was difficult to distinguish the faces of the turtle and suggested we may like to colour the underside another colour to help determine orientation. He tried the rand value, and found it to be quite amusing. He used it mostly for colour rather than either lengths or angles. He also discovered the use of fwd -10.
Undo proved very helpful too, and revealed a simple bug in the implementation thereof.
Additional interesting ideas proposed by the student were:
- Collision detection would be nice, e.g. draw until you find a line
- Select a set of commands from the history window and add them directly to a procedure
- Select a set of lines and make them into a procedure
- Select a line and get info on where it starts and ends,and what commands would be needed to get there
- The availability of mathematic functions like Cos, Sin, sqrt, etc to save external calculation.
He also commented to say that the SL avatar was utterly useless in most respects (for the turtle) but the turtle itself (perceived as another avatar) was invaluable for determining direction. He was also thoroughly frustrated by the key combinations needed to change views, zoom, etc etc and kept moving the platform by mistake.
Quantitative Data
| Criteria | Mark (1-10) |
|---|---|
| The view rotation controls | 5 |
| The ability to create a second turtle to try out something else | 6 |
| The presence of an avatar | 3 |
| The use of animation when drawing lines with the turtle | 6 |
| The shiny graphics | 7 |
| You can have multiple user's avatars present and use the turtle together | 4 |
| The use of SL's chat system to control the turtle | 6 |