Google summer of code projects

Goggle summer of code projects

A place to list projects that might be work as "Goggle summer of code projects". Write a short summary -- and if you wish create a new wiki page for more details.

• Project: Data mine WW database. Write software that allows one to determine which WeBWorK projects are hard, which ones are defective? which ones are effective?
  • The basic plan would be to data mine the databases existing at each site to catalog questions that have an unusual number of wrong attempts before the question is answered correctly. This requires software to do the preliminary extraction and then software to make it fairly easy for humans to analyze the questions and determine what causes the large number of wrong attempts. Bad question wording? just hard? used in inappropriate course? How to determine effectiveness is even more nebulous -- although that is what would most like to know. Another statistic might be which questions are most widely used? A flexible tool that allowed asking many related questions would be most useful.
  • Add other statistical questions here:
  • Preliminary plan of attack: Data_mine_good_questions

• Related project: User interface for question statistics. Develop user interface software that mapped collection of statitical metadata about questions described above onto the NationalProblemLibrary and Library browser so that instructors would have this information easily available as they chose questions for their classes. This would probably involve perl programming to interoperate properly with the existing WW course management interface.

Rules

• Be creative
• Be specific: what do you want to be implemented
• If you are willing to mentors those ideas, add your name and email to the idea.
• It is ok to have a project idea without parent project
• If you're an interested student, add your name and email next to the idea. It is ok to have several students interested by one idea.
• Aspiring students and mentors need to register and submit their proposals or request on the Soc app

Ideas

User Interface

Global UI Projects

Title	Project	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Possible mentor(s)	Comments	Potential student(s)
Your project title here e.g. Cure world hunger	Your project link here (optional)e.g. GSoC	Your project description here. Be as precise and specific as possible. Link to bugs...	Your name here	Your Possible mentors here	Your additional comments	Potential/interested students
Update User Interface		The primary goal of this project would be update the user interface code so that it conforms (as much as usefully possible) to current web coding standards, e.g. W3C standards for xhtml, css, and accessibility. Along the way, the student could modernize the look and feel of WeBWorK via creative use of CSS, Ajax or other technologies as deemed appropriate.	JAA	Roth, Cervone, LaRose, Gage	Additional Comments: Accessibility support is probably a deeper project than working with the html and css alone. E.g. would it be necessary to include in PG a capability for authors to supply alt tags formulas, images, applets.	--
Localization		WeBWorK has been adapted to several sites in Europe and Asia. Sometimes it is used without translation and in some cases parts of the interface have been translated (localized). As an aid to future localization this project would index all strings in the ContentGenerator files (for a start) to language files. Future translations could be accomplished by adding new language files. This project could proceed in tandem with the Web 2.0 update of the user interface above and as a third outcome could regularize and improve the error messages.	MEG	Roth, Cervone, LaRose, Gage, ...	Additional Comments: This project localizes the WeBWorK interface, not the individual homework questions. Attempting automatic translation of questions would be much more difficult and may not be worthwhile since (1) they are for the most part not that difficult to write (2) questions from one educational system to another differ by more than language. Localizing the strings in the commonly used PG macro and library files (in particular the MathObjects error messages ) would be part of this project.	--

Instructor UI

Title	Project	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Possible mentor(s)	Comments	Potential student(s)
Your project title here e.g. Cure world hunger	Your project link here (optional)e.g. GSoC	Your project description here. Be as precise and specific as possible. Link to bugs...	Your name here	Your Possible mentors here	Your additional comments	Potential/interested students
Statistics interface		Create (1.) a useful instructor interface to question statistics in the library (making question choices easier), (2.) a more useful analysis and display of student progress, with graphs. (3.) Modify the "success indicator" so that it has more meaning. Issue alerts based on this?	MEG	Pizer, Aubrey	--	--

Database reorganization

Title	Project	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Possible mentor(s)	Comments	Potential student(s)
Your project title here e.g. Cure world hunger	Your project link here (optional)e.g. GSoC	Your project description here. Be as precise and specific as possible. Link to bugs...	Your name here	Your Possible mentors here	Your additional comments	Potential/interested students
Database reorganization	Your project link here (optional)e.g. GSoC	"replace rows with columns" Currently each course has 7 or 8 separate tables. We need a database designed and implemented with a table for each class of data (e.g. a table for user data, problem data, homework/gateway quiz set data, assignment data). The tables should probably be narrower and use left joins to perform some of the current retrievals from single records. (Historical note: the current tables were designed a dozen years ago to use small GDBM databases. The design was preserved when the mysql database was instituted to preserve backward compatibility. That is no longer an issue.) The current organization of the Moodle database suggests some possibilities.	MEG	Gage, Leventi, Hathaway	This is a tricky problem. During the reorganization a number of other details need to be attended to: stop using problem numbers or set names or login names as primary keys, ) The new organization must match up well if not perfectly with the high level calls in DB.pm. Thorough testing will be required before we can place it in the standard release. Code for transferring data safely from the old database is highly desirable if not essential.

Site admin page/ Integrity unit tests/ installation aids

Title	Project	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Possible mentor(s)	Comments	Potential student(s)
Your project title here e.g. Cure world hunger	Your project link here (optional)e.g. GSoC	Your project description here. Be as precise and specific as possible. Link to bugs...	Your name here	Your Possible mentors here	Your additional comments	Potential/interested students
Admin page Web 2.0 face lift	Your project link here (optional)e.g. GSoC	Very little has been done with the user interface for site administrators to make it easy to use for adding, archiving, unarchiving and renaming courses. It is functional but primitive. In addition the backend has a good deal of cut and paste code that should be re factored. The archiving capability should be available to course owners so that they can archive and download their own courses (but not unarchive courses). The backend should also be configured so that it can be called from the command line for those large sites that need to automatically script course setup/archive procedures for the start and end of the term.	MEG	Aubrey, Pizer	This would work best if there was frequent consultation with WeBWorK site maintainers around the country in order to collect and refine ideas that will really help make the site admins job easier.	Potential/interested students
WW site unit testing	Your project link here (optional)e.g. GSoC	Perhaps in conjunction with additional installation wizards, this would test that a WW site was complete and ready to go. Check to see that all CPAN modules are installed (and perhaps check that they are up to date) Check that pathways are correct. Offer troubleshooting suggestions if they are not. Some reconfiguration might be safely done from the web -- This would involve reorganization of the global.conf file mechanism.	MEG	Your Possible mentors here	This would work best if there was frequent consultation with WeBWorK site maintainers around the country in order to collect and refine ideas that will really help make the site admins job easier.	Potential/interested students

PG language

Title	Project	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Possible mentor(s)	Comments	Potential student(s)
Your project title here e.g. Cure world hunger	Your project link here (optional)e.g. GSoC	Your project description here. Be as precise and specific as possible. Link to bugs...	Your name here	Your Possible mentors here	Your additional comments	Potential/interested students
Combine matrix objects		The MathObjects matrices (really matrix valued functions) and the CPAN Matrix objects have similar but not identical syntax and capabilities. Implement all of the CPAN Matrix functionality under the MathObject front end in order to reduce confusion	MEG	Gage, Cervone	-	-

National Problem Library projects

Title	Project	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Possible mentor(s)	Comments	Potential student(s)
Your project title here e.g. Cure world hunger	Your project link here (optional)e.g. GSoC	Your project description here. Be as precise and specific as possible. Link to bugs...	Your name here	Your Possible mentors here	Your additional comments	Potential/interested students

Data mining / guided instruction

Title	Project	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Possible mentor(s)	Comments	Potential student(s)
Your project title here e.g. Cure world hunger	Your project link here (optional)e.g. GSoC	Your project description here. Be as precise and specific as possible. Link to bugs...	Your name here	Your Possible mentors here	Your additional comments	Potential/interested students
WW question review	Data_mine_good_questions	Develop software and methods to determine which are the best, most used or most effective questions. (which are least?)	MEG	Gage, Aubrey, Pearson	--	--

CMS (Blackboard, Moodle, Angel?) integration projects

Title	Project	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Possible mentor(s)	Comments	Potential student(s)
Your project title here e.g. Cure world hunger	Your project link here (optional)e.g. [Google_summer_of_code_projects GSoC]	Your project description here. Be as precise and specific as possible. Link to bugs...	Your name here	Your Possible mentors here	Your additional comments	Potential/interested students
Moodle WW question type		Finish project which allows WeBWorK questions to appear in a Moodle Quiz. Make this work with Moodle 2.0 quiz type. (see related PG basics project)	MEG	Gage, Leventi