Week 5: Finishing the Shapes Applet;
First Week of the Dance Tool
This week, I was determined to finish the shapes applet project. I've already finished rendering the cube, sphere, and pyramid for the shapes applet. I also figured out how to manipulate each shape (texture, lighting, size, etc). Now, I was working on a way to combine the drag and drop code with the 3D rendering code. Merging two different sets of code is always fun (that was a sarcastic statement). With Eve's help, I was able to figure out how to manipulate the shapes on the canvas with the drag and drop controls. When a user drags a shape button into a panel, the 3D form of the shape is rendered onto the canvas. As the user moves the icons on the panel, the 3D figure on the canvas also moves. Since we have the basics of drag and drop controls under our belt, we now move on to the dance tool.
Eve gave us information of prior work that was done with the dance tool. Apparently the dance tool was started with a group of students before us. Eve gave us the presentation of the game pitch which presents the game idea and goes into detail about what's so awesome about the game. There was also a game design document which gave us a general idea of the game design. Eve also mentioned that we could add to the design document of the progress we have made in making the dance tool a reality. Wow! Our contributions will be used by programmers after us.
After looking at all of the information about the design tool and looking at the mock-up of the design tool, our first task was to figure out the design of the dance tool. Would we keep the design of the dance tool, or are we going to change it? We were also going to develop a UML document that gives a blueprint of how to implement the dance tool design after we have the design layout figured out.
For this week’s presentation, I discussed the details of finishing up the shapes applet. I also discuss our plans for the next week which is to start working on the dance tool. For my literature review, I read the research paper titled “Culturally Situated Design Tools: Ethnocomputing from Field Site to Classroom”. The research paper discusses what CSDTs are and why they were created. I thought that reading this paper would also help me with the dance tool. To see my presentation, click here.
CSDT website: http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/csdt.html