You want to help the PLM project but don’t know where to start? This file is for you! It contains many ideas that would improve the PLM so you just have to select one of them, contact us and here we go! You can contribute to the project!
First of all, you want to get some context about the PLM. For that, check that presentation of Dec. 2014. It presents the project and gives a roadmap of future developments. http://webloria.loria.fr/~quinson/blog/2014/1204/PLM.pdf (in French, sorry)
The level 0 of contribution is to report any glitch (either technical or pedagogical, or even typos in the mission texts).
Then of course, you should have a look at the known bugs and issues. Any help to solve them is very welcome. https://github.com/oster/PLM/issues and https://github.com/oster/webPLM/issues. We have 2 bug trackers because the project is modular :)
Another idea is to help translating the material. How to do that is documented here: https://github.com/BuggleInc/PLM/wiki/Working-on-translations
Fourth idea, some extension ideas are given in the “help”/”About this lesson” menu of most existing lessons. You can find these files in the archive by searching files named “Main.html” in the differing subdirectories. They are even translated to other languages, if that helps.
Finally, some less baked ideas are listed directly in this file, below. Do not hesitate to ask if you have any question.
The important here is that I try to build lessons on important notions, not entertaining or particularly challenging things. That’s the main editorial difference with projects like Codingame.com or other programming challenges. They want to find the best programmers out there, I want to teach everybody the things that good programmers need to know.
That being said, I have no strong feelings about the parts of informatics that should be taught in the PLM. I seriously think about adding a lesson on HPC programming in C with MPI, for example, even if that’s very different from the existing content.
- There is some bug about exercises that should be slightly improved, such as. They are all visible from that list: Exercise
There is naturally a huge body of things that we could add to the PLM. Take one book such as the Cormen or the Sedgewik and just pick some random ideas.
A particularly interesting lead would be to implement slightly different versions of the same exercise so that we can do some sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing. In particular, we’d like to evaluate this way whether students prefer large assignments with a large degree of freedom, or a longer list of very constrained challenges.
Adding them could only require to reimplement an adapted universe (similar to BuggleWorld or TurtleWorld or SortingWorld), and import the existing exercises from the upstream authors.
At least, that’s the initial plan but in practice, I often change the exercises to integrate them in the gameplay of having buggles and also because I love adapting the stuff that I integrate…
- Karel the robot (it may be sufficient to build a loader of karel worlds within the buggle world)
- PatchWorld. This one is very good for absolute learners. http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs111/fall07/notes/lectures/06_picture_world_intro_web.pdf
- These people, who invented the whole buggle concept had many other ideas:
- Another classical recursive game:
- We could try to adapt some ideas from similar frameworks, such as http://javascool.gforge.inria.fr/ In particular, we could use some kind of micro-world to teach the various graph algorithms as they do.
They may require a King of Hill mode, but that’s also doable.
- Robozzle. This is very close to the Lightbot that we had before moving to the web, but needs some specific improvements: #3
- CodeRuler (strategy)
- CodeRobot (fights between robots)
- CodeRally (racing cars)
- CodeInvaders (fight between spaceships) https://www-927.ibm.com/ibm/cas/hspc/competition/
- MARS (assembly) http://courses.missouristate.edu/kenvollmar/mars/
- MMIX (assembly by Knuth) http://mmix.cs.hm.edu/index.html
- Corewars
- Use the same shortcuts than eclipse (when possible)
- Provide autocompletion on keywords and bindings
- have the editor follow the execution point during stepped execution
- During step-by-step execution, it’d be great to display the content of values. See #116
- Locations displayed in the console should be links that move the editor.
- represent graphically the textual diff between the expected world and the actual one. We would have red circles on cells that have an error (either wrong color or wrong message), red crosses on badly located buggles, etc.