Summary of notes from 2/17 meeting with Dr. Goodwin

Dr. Goodwin described the real-life interviewing process in four main steps:

     1.  History
     2.  Physical
     3.  Tests
     4.  Diagnosis (answer)

We thus envision our program to include the following:

     1.  User chooses Case to observe.
     2.  A brief summary of the family history is presented to the user.
     3.  User can select which family member to interview.
     4.  The following scenario is presented to the user (one of the main screens):

     5.  Other user options:

               Patient Physical - includes images of the patient's various body parts that the user                          can explore
               Tests - given a list of tests on the left, bring up the result on the right side

So basically, we have a system with a front-end (the client) and a back-end.(the server).  The program will need to keep track of the current user, and thus we are going to need to keep track of the session ID (by utilizing a simple SQL database or an even simpler file structure).  By doing so, we will also be able to track which cases have been viewed, along with which questions the user has asked.  This will be useful for Dr. Goodwin in examining the way in which the student has thought about the questions and subsequent answers.

Post-meeting, we came up with the following (very basic) schema:

     Front-End - session ID

     Back-End

          Question Engine (sexy CS stuff)
               - parsing
               - responses

          Session ID
               - user
               - case
               - questions asked

A question yet to be answered is whether a database or a simple file system would be better suited for this particular problem.