[OH-Dev] Oppia-ified tar training mission feedback

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hey all,

but mostly Tarashish, but I figured others might be interested,

Tarashish (aka sunu) linked me to a beta of the tar training mission here:

https://oh-oppia-test-2.appspot.com/

And here is my feedback!

1. Where is the source code?

I'd love to see the code behind the scenes somewhere. Additionally, I 
suppose that the AGPLv3 license on the training missions requires that you 
share the source with users of the app.



2. It would be nice if your demo site permitted the whole world to view 
the exploration's full details.

It seems that I can do within the Exploration Editor once I copy the 
exploration, after logging in. So further review is based on what I see 
there, in the exploration editor, after creating a copy.



3. It would be nice if the hints showed up.

Maybe that requires adding a "widget" for it?

The old tar mission gave you suggestions on how to do the task, whereas 
the current one doesn't. I presume (but we should document this somewhere) 
that this is on your TODO already, even if just mentally.



4. As I click through the exploration, I suppose that it would be nice if 
I could "cheat".

I'm not sure what the best design is here, but I've watched as people at 
e.g. PyCon sprints figure out what each mission is like, and want to 
preview the mission to get a sense of its educational content. Maybe the 
UI should not let people cheat, but then there should be a clear link to 
the exploration editor, even if in a read-only mode, so people could get a 
sense of that.



5. It is *so* cool that in the exploration editor, when there is a 
transition rule from one step to another, you can click the step name to 
go there.

This makes previewing/reviewing the exploration/mission super fun!



6. I'm really impressed you wrote so many classifiers.

I'm looking at the "Pack" step, and wow, from the list of "Answer 
classification rules" listed, it is clear we provide feedback for a large 
number of cases. Did you really port all these over? I should test them...

Yes! I just tested one, and the right error message is shown.

I think this is the coolest thing, to see all these outcomes printed right 
there in the exploration editor!



7. It's a little weird that when I upload a file, the system seems to 
print a hash of the file or something?

Screenshot: http://rose.makesad.us/~paulproteus/tmp/hash-or-something.png

I'm referring to the long, non-English text there, toward the middle 
(vertically) of the screenshot.



8. In the old tar mission, you could jump between steps willy-nilly, but 
you can't here.

Maybe this means that each of these "missions" for the tar training should 
be separate explorations... but it would be nice if the system optionally 
packaged them up for you in a linear way, but you could skip between them.

This sort of relates to the ability to "cheat". This came up for me 
because I wanted to test the second step, the packing of tarballs, without 
re-doing the first step.



9. It would be nice if, after I hit OK after I choose a file, some text 
were printed that said "Processing..." and went away when it was done 
processing.

This is just one suggestion. The general problem I'm having is, "When I 
interact with Oppia, I can't tell if it received my click, and it turns 
out that it did, but I learn this 0.5 seconds later, so I'm confused for 
half a second."

Other suggestions welcome!

This is probably handled best as an upstream issue in Oppia?

I suspect the reason we see this, but upstream doesn't, is that upstream's 
Google App Engine is configured to respond to more requests per second 
simultaneously than ours is, so the request is handled more speedily for 
them. But I'm not sure.


10. If it's OK with you, we should do these tests via a .openhatch.org 
domain.

I'd love to make this site be missions-beta.openhatch.org. I've already 
configured that domain to be "Google hosted," so I think it just requires 
you to configure your oppia-test app in Google App Engine to respond to 
the "missions-beta.openhatch.org" domain name.

That way, more people other than me will realize that this is what you are 
working on!



11. It'd be lovely if this had some kind of OpenHatch branding.

Maybe we can add that in the relatively near future. : D



12. It'd be lovely if when you landed on the home page of this, you could 
easily see a list of the missions that were relevant to open source 
contribution.

I realize that right now, this is "just a test", but I would say that it's 
probably best if the test version becomes our official Oppia missions beta, 
in which case we should probably remove the non-open-source-related 
missions like the adventure game, and make the front page somehow indicate 
that there are more missions available than just the tar one.

I do like that the first page of the site launches you into doing 
something. Maybe an index of missions belongs in the navigation header 
up-top?



I think that's all I have for now. I'm really excited to see all this!

-- Asheesh.