Meeting One: Organization

Held: Monday, January 19, 1998

Administrivia

• By next week, try to come up with a few (at least one) potential exercise that we might develop. Your exercise need not be described in as much detail as the samples, but you should have some sense of
  • what students will do,
  • why they will find it interesting,
  • what they will learn, and
  • what libraries we'll need to develop to support your exercise.
• By Wednesday, please take a look at the description and suggest any changes. I'll incorporate them Thursday morning and you can then use it for your independent study form.
• Handouts: facial distortion exercise, cut detection exercise.

Introduction

• The purpose of this independent study is to develop multimedia exercises for our introductory courses. This means that we'll be looking at exercises that allow students to experiment with multimedia while learning core concepts.
• Along the way, we'll be learning a variety of topics (and I'll be learning many of them, too).
• By taking this course, you are committing yourself to working diligently towards our goals. In particular, those taking it for 2 credits should work at least six hours each week (including the meeting) and those taking it for 4 credits should work at least eleven hours each week (including the meeting).
• The front door has more general information about the project.

Basic Administration

• Don't forget that you need to fill out an independent study form for this course. If you don't know where to get such a form, ask your classmates.
  • The full title of this course is Developing Algorithmic Multimedia Exercises
  • The abbreviation for your transcript should be "ALG MULTIMEDIA"
  • I've prepared a description of the course you can attach. However, you should wait until we've had a chance to polish it before using it.
• You'll need to pick tasks for next week. You may work alone or in groups (my preferred organization would be one 4-credit student working as group leader with a few 2-credit students, but it's up to you).

Sample Exercises

• We'll spend a few minutes going over the introductory exercises, commenting as appropriate.

Tasks

• We'll need to pick tasks to work on this week. Here are some I've come up with (and we'll see if we can find others):
  • Get and install VideoScheme; read the corresponding paper to start learning about it. You may need to send email to James.Matthews@dartmouth.edu to get a copy.
  • Learn about Java Beans.
  • Start working on the GIF library (design, reading existing stuff). Talk to Chris de Beer and Aaron Dale about what they already have working.
  • Look for Java multimedia libraries.
  • Look for Java or Scheme Web libraries.
  • Scan through a recent proceedings of the ACM Conference on Multimedia for good ideas.
  • Scan through a recent proceedings of the EdMedia Conference on Multimedia and Hypermedia in education.