On Feb. 11, our group met with Adam Blumenthal, the director of the multimedia lab at Classical High School, a magnet school. The lab is currently all Macs, but there will be 6 Windows machines soon. Also, the lab currently connects to the Internet via modem, but will be installing a high speed network within the next few months.
The project is to design software that will teach high school students how the Internet works. This will not be part of a class, but will just be available in the lab for any students who want to use it. The primary purpose of this software is not to be a tutorial (ie., how to send email, how to browse the web), but to explain what goes on technically when you do those things (what happens when you type www.blah.com in a web browser, for instance). In our discussion with Adam we realized that although the underlying technology should be the main focus, a certain amount of "how to" information will have to be integrated into the software. It is not practical to try to teach the inner workings of the internet to students who are not familiar with at least the very basic outer layer functionality.
The software will include material on four subjects: e-mail, the web, Usenet (newsgroups), and AOL and other ISPs. We discussed including FTP and Telnet, but decided against it because the students at Classical don't have much need to use those technologies.
We looked at a CD-ROM called Internet: the City, which is tutorial software on similar subjects. The main flaw, we decided, was that it was only minorly interactive: the user clicked to move from page to page, but that was all. It was boring largely because it was passive. We discussed the importance of making our software more engagingly interactive.
Adam's vision for the software includes "lots of wires" demonstrating how things are connected in the Internet. We discussed a "layer" metaphor, with a top layer showing what the user does, and deeper layer(s) peeling back to reveal what's going on underneath the user's action.
As for the medium to create our software, we all agreed that HTML was the most practical. Advantages: it can run in any browser, so it will run easily on both Macs and PCs; it supports a great deal of graphical and design creativity; it lends itself well to the type of hypertextual interactive environment we want to create. We discussed both cgi scripts and Java applets to add functionality beyond what HTML can provide. Adam is experienced with graphics and is very willing to help us with that aspect.