Class notes for 02/01/2012

A sampling of interesting sites/systems
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Khan Academy: http://khanacademy.org
Done.

IXL: http://ixl.com
Another site with auto-graded math exercises and "back end"
support. Commercial, must pay to use.
Note: If you click on "see all the skills" for a grade, you can see a
list that will pop up sample questions. Quite similar to KA exercises.
Question: How useful is the KA Knowledge Map?

Creative Commons repositories of educational materials
Connexions (http://cnx.org), LeMill (http:/lemill.net)
Example textbook: Sound Reasoning
http://cnx.org/content/col10214/latest/
See "Listening Gallery: How Music Makes Sense". This has multiple
choice question, audio clips
Questions: How much do the multiple choice questions in the text help?
What requirements should there be regarding completion of these
questions?
How important is audio?

Quadbase
http://quadbase.org
Builds up a question bank. Static questions only. Nice interface for
writing questions.

Stanford AI course: https://www.ai-class.com/home/
Video lectures, discussion forums. I don't know how the homeworks worked.
Supposedly over 100,000 students?
This appears to be just a series of videos. Many of the videos have an
associated multiple choice question. Look at, for example, 2.9 on
Breadth first seach.
Questions:
1) Do you think that the multiple choice question helps?
2) Do you think hearing this audio explanation is better than reading
a text description of the same algorithm? Do you think that a
visualization would be better? With or without audio?

"How To Think Like a Computer Scientist": Learning Python
http://thinkcspy.appspot.com
Look at their support for editing and executing snippets of
Python. However, there is no "autograding" feedback.

Web Programming: eL-CID
http://www.boisvert.me.uk/
Combines and editable JavaScript/HTML window with slideshow for
instruction.
See for example Rollover. You can click on "go" to execute the current
code, and click on "edit" tab to modify code.

grockit.com
The video is interesting. The site looks a lot like KA.