Usability Testing
This project has three sections which I shall discuss independently;
Section One: Getting Started
This is a short section. It is designed to run for 2-4 weeks depending how deeply the teacher wishes to explore the subject. It can make an interesting change to the standard word-processing and PowerPoint tasks which students routinely encounter during their IT studies in years 7 and 8.
The work itself is based on my own experience of teaching the subject in 2003. This unit was taught six times during that period to each class in Yr7. These students provided a pool of usability testers to iron any bugs. The practical lessons themselves are very simple. The concepts behind the markup written by the students however provides some challenging concepts, such as the idea of a meta-language to describe the structure or nature of a text element in a page as in the use of the <h1> tag to encapsulate the main heading ( h1 means heading 1 )
<h1>Main Heading</h1>
This unit is pretty well bullet-proof in terms of the technology requirements; a computer, a text editor and a web browser. No network or internet access is required (except to view the lessons)
Section Two: Looking Good
This section was developed immediately before, and during my prac at Smith's Hill High School .. It was developed as a unit of work for year 9-10 level students, and was taught to a digital media elective class with students from yrs 8-10 in it. Some sections were developed later for completeness and were not studied by the SHHS students.
This unit is application specific; it requires the Macromedia Dreamweaver software to complete it. For more advanced web design it is usual to use an IDE (Integrated Development Environment, otherwise know as a web-page design program such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver). I intend to develop the FrontPage version of this section in the next couple of weeks, but have not had time as yet.
This is a comprehensive unit. It covers all of the main components of a web page. My experience with the SHHS students was that they responded well to the lessons, and found the material accessible and interesting, but the three week time frame of the prac was too short and they became somewhat overwhelmed by the amount of content, and had trouble retaining some core information. This would suit a ten week unit, or several shorter units spaced throughout the year.
Section Three: Code Warrior
This section was developed for senior students. It introduces the concept of computer code that can be executed inside a web page. To do this correctly, some extra computer requirements are needed. The student needs to be able to publish their work to a web server for it to be able to process the code correctly. It is possible, and indeed recommended that students install a personal web server on their own machines. This is not difficult and instructions for WinXP users is provided. Once the webserver is installed, php must be installed. This is a bit more tricky as it requires configuring a .ini (initialization) file in the windows folder, and altering the environmental variables. Instructions are provided, but a certain base level of computer competency is needed.
Once these initial preparations are made however, php will work transparently in the background. The development tools (text editor and web browser) are the same as for section one.
This section was tested by me only, as time precluded wider testing. To test it I checked all links and presentation, and that the example application, an online order form for the fictional High Class Computer Supplies company, worked correctly.
In several sections I have displayed sections of code for students to cut and paste if they are having trouble debugging code of their own. All these sections of code have been tested to make sure they give the correct result when used. The lessons do contain a lot of content, and new concepts are introduced in each lesson. I think that the central application developed throughout the whole of section three unifies and gives context to each abstract concept, such as variables, strings or operators.