On Tuesday, we launched Ivanhoe 1.0. As Scott noted yesterday, much of the PHP which drives our Ivanhoe Wordpress theme is the product of our many hours spent in the Scholars’ Lab pair-programming.
Now that Ivanhoe 1.0 is out in the world, Scott and I have settled down to tackle the next feature: fluffy tree.
(Minotaur Scott & Ammit Veronica tackle Fluffy Tree Bunny)
Fluffy tree will enable users to respond to multiple moves at once, thereby creating a broader network of connections within each game. The feature name arose from a conversation we and the Scholars’ Lab developers had early in the semester about how to conceptualize the Ivanhoe game within the blog-based structure of WordPress - we didn’t want a ‘vine,’ with one move linking to the next in a linear/hierarchical fashion, but a ‘fluffy tree,’ in which moves intertwined with one another in an organic fashion.
To write the code for fluffy tree, we have had to take a jumbled mess of potential connections and turn it into a clear, linear progression of events. This has required a lot of white-board time and adding JavaScript to our programming repertoire. While we do not yet have fluffy tree working, we have definitely figured out how to work on it - and really, knowing how to work collaboratively is a goal in itself.