Intuitively Obvious

• A total of 11 students have "unsolvable" schedules, meaning they asked for class combinations that can't fit.
• One computer class has 29 students registered. The problem is that there are at most 24 computers in the labs.
• We haven't counted to see if we're using more rooms than are in the school (Details!)

Fortunately, a lot of the 11 student problems are easily fixed; usually their guidance counselor will say something like "Sorry, if you want to take AP English you'll have to skip Intro to Walking" (not a real course, but I didn't want to offend any of my peers by naming their course). As far as the lab overloads, the system does have a "seating optimizer" function that systematically tries to juggle students around to avoid such issues.

As far as room overbooking goes, THAT could be a show stopper

The bottom line is that we managed to get things close to done in a very brief timeframe. What is frustrating is that we lost a week trying to get the "new and improved" version of the software working, only to find that it can't do the job it claimed it could. It is amazing to think that we could have been finished on Monday, if we had not tried to save some time. Such is life.

• Some sections of a course were larger than others: one course had enrollments ranging from 3 to 50.
• It seemed to disregard the computer lab size limitations, putting 48 in one class (as stated above, the max is 24)
• One teacher is set up for three sections one semester, 7 the other

As they say, "Not ready for prime time." (Put another way,  as another teacher I know puts it, "In theory, theory is the same as practice; in practice, it isn't.") So, it's back to the manual "find a time slot and see how many students we can schedule." By the end of today we got all the singletons (courses with single sections) through the "quints" (courses with five sections), with only three kids who didn't get everything. Tomorrow I hope to get the six's through 10's, and over the weekend we'll push through up to the 12's.

The problem is, we know that soon we'll start getting more and more missed schedules. The imagination aspect requires that we try to massage the schedules to minimize those kinds of hits. Ideally, we'd like to have about a dozen "can't fit"s when we're done. Unfortunately, it gets tedious from here on out.

The APCS class started in XNA today. We didn't get very far, but the enthusiasm level was palpable.

Class was only 35 minutes today (an early-release day, since tonight is the Senior Prom!), so there wasn't much opportunity to do much anyway. I spent yesterday getting the Visual C# Express Service Pack 1 and XNA Express loaded on the 15 systems in the lab; also we purchased 4 XBox 360 USB controllers (okay, so that was last minute!), and this morning just before class I franticly ran around getting the controller software installed … almost. 3 of the 15 refused to load the controller software. (They worked later, after class was over of course.) 

When the students arrived they dove into XNA, asking me essentially every question on earth. My response for almost all of them was, “I don’t know, figure it out please.” You could say that it was a cop-out answer, but the fact is that THEY will be running this portion of the class, not me. I laid out the ground rules, that they had to keep a journal (a simple Word document) of what they did each day, and that their grades would be based on what they accomplished, not necessarily that they completed a game. It was refreshing to know that they thought this was more than fair.

Our first big snag came towards the end of the half-hour, however, when we realized that the computers, with their generic VGA-style video cards, probably don’t have enough video horse power to run the completed games. I’m in a quandary over how to handle this: Perhaps we can obtain a few high-powered video adapters (not the full 15, of course, can’t afford that), or we can test them on laptops that DO have enough power, see if they can develop games that don’t need the full power of an XBox, or perhaps even try to run things on an XBox 360. Barring one of these solutions (or another equally effective one), we might be dead in the water.

Has anyone in the audience tried the XNA toolkit?

As I previously mentioned, I will be challenging my APCS students (now that the exam is done, and they've got a few weeks before finals / graduation) to explore the XNA Studio, and come up with SOMEthing creative. With a wide-open definition like that, they will have to track their efforts to justify a grade at the end, but other than that relatively minor inconvenience it means that their creative juices can flow wherever they want. I just finished installing XNA onto the computers in the lab; tomorrow (first period) I’ll lay out the ground rules, and let them loose.

In past years, such carte blanche has  yielded some fairly impressive results: tip calculators, Tetris, Risk, Missile Command, and planetary orbit simulators, to name a few. The students know that they have to impress me, plain and simple, and they usually do.

XNA, of course, might be more than a single student can tackle in a few weeks, so this opens up a new world of collaborative effort. I envision the stronger students taking on the coding, with others working on strategy / logic flows, graphic design / artwork, documentation, and even testing (an often overlooked aspect of any programming project). Hence the reason that I say they will need to document their efforts: a paragraph or two at the end of each period will be all that is necessary. Aside from the tracking purposes, it will also introduce them to the concept of an Engineer’s Notebook, a tool that I personally almost never used in the real world, but others I know (my wife, for example) kept religiously. The record of effort spent will help me assign grades next month, but will also let them organize their thoughts, plan project milestones, brainstorm concepts, … just like a real world job.

Hopefully, as the weeks progress, I’ll have much to talk about.