[Edu-sig] CP4E (states cgi demo)

[John Miller]

I like it. Thanks, Kirby. I'd simply like to suggest a couple of minor 
modification to the quiz.

When I go to the quiz, I'm overwhelmed by the number of choices in the 
popup, and find it difficult to find the right city. How about instead 
populating the popup with the correct city plus, say, half-a-dozen to a 
dozen other randomly selected other cities? (I realize that with 
repeated refreshes, a cheater could eventually eliminate all but the 
right choice...)

Also, going the other way is useful: "Lansing is the capital of which 
state?"

I'm also wondering about managing the data when a class scales it up. 
For example, I can imagine extending the data beyond the USA to include 
countries and their capitals. Now we need another column to indicate 
the region of interest for the quiz. Not too hard. Now let's imagine 
other sorts of quizzes, e.g., "Which of these 8 cities is NOT in South 
America?" Now each database row has another column listing major 
cities. And this, of course, is best handled relationally. My question 
is, how can the data be managed, and grown, by the students in an 
educationally relevant way?

I guess I'm wondering not only about partitioning the data, but also 
partitioning the learning. One way would be for each student (or small 
team) to maintain their own set of (largely identical) data. Another 
approach might be for each student (or team) to maintain different sets 
of data. And if these different datasets are to be related, students 
need to coordinate their efforts. (And then, layer in the various 
quizzes that could be developed...)

I haven't had the opportunity to teach programming yet, so I'm curious 
how those who have might approach the data-management aspect in this 
scenario Kirby is sketching.

John Miller

On Apr 12, 2005, at 3:42 AM, "Kirby Urner" <urnerk at qwest.net> wrote:

> OK, so a next iteration of where I'm going with my little lesson about
> databases is here:
>
> http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/geoquiz.html
>
> It's still too dry -- needs some graphics, more splashes of color.  
> But the
> content is sort of there.
>
> This is one of those pages you can browse fairly quickly or, if you 
> want to
> study for awhile, you've got source code for doing cgi scripts with 
> MySQL
> using Python.
>
> Nothing fancy.  It's the kind of code one naturally wants to improve.
>
> Kirby