Challenge-Machine Blog

Small fixes to allow “following” and “recommending”

Tim Diggins — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:14:37 +0000

We have just deployed a small fix to deal with problems trying to “follow” other challenge machine users, to “recommend” good challenges, and also be able to flag something as needing attention by a teacher (moderation).

We’re still working on getting rid of the pop-up dialogs!

Small update

Tim Diggins — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:17:32 +0000

Just a brief post to note that we updated the site with slight design updates (especially on widget styling) and additional features for moderators to clear items flagged in error.

New design, recommendations and more

Tim Diggins — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 09:06:40 +0000

Lots of updates for the new school year (oops did you already go back last week? Sorry, we’ve been so busy, we didn’t notice the calendar flip over to September).

We’ve launched the new design for the Challenge Machine – we hope you like it. Along with making the site look fresher and more friendly, we’ve also tidied up the layouts (where things are put on the page) and the navigation (how you move around from page to page) so that (we hope) the site is easier to use. Give it a few days and then let us know what you think (you can add a comment here, or you can use the new contact form on the site).

Along with the new designs comes several new features…

Recommendations

A prominent feature of the new design is the “Most recommended” which appears on both the “home page” and the main “Explore” page. You can recommend any challenges that you have taken – and the challenges that have been recommended the most (in the last two weeks) get onto the home page. You can also view someone else’s recommendations – if you like some of their challenges, you will probably like the other ones.

Widgets and sharing challenges

Another feature of the new design is that challenges are displayed as little boxes, with a preview of the design of the first page. These boxes are also usable as “widgets” on other sites. It’s a tiny bit techy, but by copying the widget code, you can display a challenge on your site or blog. There’s a “Share this” link on every challenge page that gives you the code. If you just want to email a link it gives you that as well.

Feedback and contact

We’ve also got a feedback button on every challenge – at present all you can let the moderators know that a challenge is inappropriate. We’ve also added a contact form for letting us know about problems, questions or your ideas.

Bug fix update

Tim Diggins — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:58:15 +0000

A small update just now to fix a few bugs that crept in with the last update. Tidied up the layout slightly too. The wysiwyg editor (for descriptions and “info/questions” works on Safari on the mac now.

Better browsing (for untaken challenges)

Tim Diggins — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:53:18 +0000

Browsing

You can browse untaken challenges (the “challenges” link in the header)
Preview of first line of the Challenge/Collection Distinction
Better clarity (we hope) for the distinction between collections and challenges (collections are “selected by” someone wheras challenges are “created by” someone)
There are some improvements to the challenge creation interface for easily moving between a page and the creation

Internet

In advance of integration with Learning platforms, we have made some material available from the internet (basically the browsing interface and the challenge names and interface). You still have to login to contribute to the site, or take a challenge.

Error reporting

Now when something goes wrong on the challenge machine, the development team are notified by email (Why didn’t we have this before! Experience with rails apps (where this is a very easy feature to implement. This also means you get a more succinct page afterwards – less intimidating when things go wrong. Hopefully also there will be less and less of these pages…

A few updates

Tim Diggins — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:20:49 +0000

A few helpful updates to get us cracking with what will be regular updates to the site:

The tag cloud at the right of the browse listing has been improved – “empty tags” (tags referring to hidden/incomplete challenges) are no longer there.
Challenges and collections now list (in a small and unobtrusive way) the ‘permalink’ for linking back to them (e.g. using in an email)
Challenges and collections always list who the creator is, with a link back to them
A strange bug had crept in which meant that some of the challenges, after being edited, ended up with pages that started with page 5 or page 25 rather than page 1. This gave page 1 (the normal first page of any challenge) give an error. This has been now fixed and the relevant challenges’ pages are numbered normally.

Great workshop gives us loads of input … and inspiration

Tim Diggins — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:30:25 +0000

Last Thursday, twelve students and five teachers who have been using the Challenge-Machine over the last few weeks and months spent several hours and lots of concentration telling us what was right and wrong about it. Some of the stuff we knew about, and some suggestions and bug reports which we’d heard before hadn’t made sense until we saw it happening in front of us. But beyond that, some exciting and new ideas. I only wish we could get them all done all at once immediately. Lots to think about, and we’re very inspired by the workshop.

We realized that better communication of changes changes that were going on behind the scenes might be useful, so we thought a blog would be a good way of letting people who use the Challenge-Machine know what’s happening. The aim is that we let you know here about any planned downtimes (announcing it on the site too, when appropriate), and when we make changes to the site we let you know here.