Nick's Results
Student: 19, Male, 2nd-year Law undergraduate
Qualitative Data
This student had not used Second Life before, and had very limited experience of Turtles/Logo but was familiar with the concept. He had no previous programming experience. He completed the square and star exercises in the 2D version of Logo, and the rhombus and cube exercises in Second Life.
Generally, he found Turtle/Logo to provide a good introduction to procedural programming, and found the graphical/visual representation of his commands useful. He found the 2D turtle quite boring. The 3D version increased his interest and motivation, and he found it helpful in thinking about geometry and in improving his special awareness. He found being able to rotate the view particularly helpful. However, as with the 2D system, he found the task quite tedious/boring overall, and would not be in any rush to use the system again. He did comment that he liked how the 3D system worked, and it was just the nature of the tasks that made it tedious. While he needed prompting to use the define/call commands for procedures, he realised once he had that this would make things much faster.
The student pointed out that it was often hard to know which way was left/right/up/down, and some sort of arrows protruding from the Turtle would be helpful. A save function would be useful because it was time consuming to draw anything but basic shapes, and being able to query the angle would be especially useful for this student.
Quantitative Data
| Criteria | Mark (1-10) |
|---|---|
| The view rotation controls | 7 |
| The ability to create a second turtle to try out something else | N/A |
| The presence of an avatar | 6 |
| The use of animation when drawing lines with the turtle | 6 |
| The shiny graphics | 6 |
| You can have multiple user's avatars present and use the turtle together | 8* |
| The use of SL's chat system to control the turtle | 7 |
* not done, but commented this would be pretty useful to collaborate with each person drawing a different part of a diagram