Genie on FOSS

My Love Hate Relationship with Twine and Harlowe

2018-02-13T16:04:54+00:00

While at WiCHacks 2018 this weekend, which entails it’s own post (coming soon), my team, the Anitfreeze Bears, used Twine to create a game. Twine is a FOSS application that generates the code for interactive stories, much like choose your own adventure games. The first Twine was created with python and javascript which generated the html, css, and javascript that make up the game. It was based on the story engine Twee. A story engine refers to the system and format used to note how the story passages link together. Twine 2 was created with mostly javascript and using the Harlowe game engine. Twine has a friendly GUI that allows for people to easily compose a story. It also includes options to export an archive of your stories and has the option to display a proofreading copy of your story that is one html page. Although this alone is enough to make great stories, you can expand the functionality through programming. There are ways to incorporate variables inside of passages to cut down on the number of passages you need to create. You can alter the display by adding your own CSS. Also you can add your own javascript to create an inventory system, like my team did, or other possibilities. Although I appreciate Twine as a powerful tool, there are also drawbacks that come with it.

The first issue I take is with the documentation; don’t get me wrong they have an awesome wiki but the website is not super clear. First off the repositories the intro paragraph point to refer to the repos for Twine 1 and 2 but are unlabeled. Also the last repo they point to is not Twine itself but Harlowe, which is what Twine 2 comes with as default. Harlowe’s documentation starts with the changelog and doesn’t really accurately explain what Harlowe does in an easy to understand manner. The most prominent documentation is changelogs, which are not as useful when you don’t understand what it is in the first place. It would benefit from a more detailed intro or a link to the story format explanation on the wiki.

Regardless of the more picky documentation issues, my team and I found that Harlowe was not the most customizable. It was good for simple things like holding variables and such but not so flexible for adding something like an inventory system or other more complex elements. We probably would have benefited from a more customizable story format but more likely we would have needed to significantly alter Twine be able to add separate game mechanics more easily. It’s still a very powerful piece of software by maintaining all the complex branches and giving a friendly user interface, it just isn’t as customizable when it comes to changing game mechanics.

Ode to Bug Reports

2018-01-24T16:04:54+00:00

The article “How to Report Bugs Effectively” by Simon Tatham is truly a rubric on how to write a clear and detailed bug report. He addresses the many issues that developers and tech support workers experience. He explains how it is necessary to include details of what exactly went wrong including error messages, what the program looks like during various stages, and the exact steps you took to get to the point of failure. He also touches on the struggles of bug reports in the FOSS world where more often than not the only form of communication is through only text. You cannot directly show the developer what went wrong, so a clearly written bug report is necessary and preferably has screen shots. He also talks about making sure the bug is reproducible as well as making sure the programmer can reproduce the bug themselves.

I found that the article was mostly aimed at users as apposed to developers. It’s more of a plea from developers to users to help us help them. The language is relatively accessible for those who have some experience with computers. That being said I still think it’s a useful reminder to developers when they are using other people’s programs. There is even a section to address this. I’ve found the article very useful as I have already sent it to some of my family members who often look to me as free tech support, in the hopes of getting clearer bug reports from them in the future. This however does bring up the point that there is no guarantee that users will actually read this even if you specifically ask them to read it before submitting a bug report. However, this doesn’t take away that this is a useful resource.

Let’s Talk About Text…. books

2018-01-24T16:04:54+00:00

This semester I’m taking College Physics II. Interestingly the textbook is not required, though highly suggested, and an alternative free and open source textbook was offered. This book is the College Physics textbook from OpenStax. Sometimes I have trouble paying attention in class when the topic we are on is boring, so I figured I would try to read ahead so I could do questions or half pay attention in class. Although I already had the proprietary book for the class (Physics 5th Edition by James S. Walker) from the previous class in the sequence, College Physics I, I decided to give the open source book a try.

I usually don’t read technical textbooks, they tend to be very thick and hard to understand. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the textbook. I didn’t expect it to be as great as it was. The explanations are helpful and succinct, which helps me to actually get through the reading. They also include pictures and examples, just as other textbooks. I didn’t really read much of the Walker’s textbook but for skimming through it I can tell there are more detailed examples then the OpenStax books. Walker’s book also includes videos of experiments should you buy the ebook version as I have. Interestingly, the OpenStax textbook also includes copies of PhET simulations. PhET simulations are little science simulations you can run on your computer. It is run by University of Colorado Boulder and they make the simulations free and open source. They are very helpful for understanding certain relationships within physics. Also they’re fun and keep students engaged. PhET simulations and the OpenStax textbook are good examples of Open Education Resources (OERs). I find that the textbooks wind up being approximately equivalent even though the examples aren’t as great as Walker’s, because most of the examples I use come from homework and classwork or the professor’s slides. The OpenStax textbook is much more accessible to me, I don’t have to login or deal with Pearson’s systems (that have seriously sub-par security, but that’s another post).

Personal preferences aside, what are the benefits and drawbacks of open textbooks and other OERs? There’s the obvious benefit to students where their wallet doesn’t cry so much. For reference, Walker is almost $200 (ow) and it’s estimated that US students spend $1,200 to $1,300 a year on textbooks (owww). As mentioned in a New Yorker article referring to research on the subject of OERs, a side effect of a free textbook means that students will not put off obtaining the textbook and fall behind. They are more likely to actually use the textbook instead of trying to manage without one because it’s too expensive to buy. A study summarized in a video in an article by Penn State on OER’s suggested that the easy access to the textbook could result in higher grades in students and a lower dropout rate. They also mention that most instructors believe that open textbooks and OERs are as good or better than proprietary resources.

Then there is the open source aspect where the OERs are adjustable due to their nature, where professors can adjust the textbooks to their needs. They can re-order, add, or remove content as they need, then easily re-distribute to their students. Any mistakes can be quickly updated. Taking the College Physics OpenStax textbook as an example, it’s very easy to open an account, as a student or teacher, and suggest changes to the book. This means that mistakes that are caught can be easily reported and remedied. This modular nature also means that the textbook can very easily be kept up to date.

I personally don’t see many drawbacks to OERs. There is the issue that perhaps the content is not as high quality as one that has someone paid to make the textbook and has set aside a considerable time to do so. Someone making the textbook for free may not have as much time to dedicate to it. This is balanced out by the fact that many instructors can collaborate on a textbook and that there are organizations that facilitate the creation of OERs such as OpenStax and PhET. Some of the issues are with the software that is included with many of these textbooks. In large intro classes an online homework system is necessary and often a proprietary system is used so that the school doesn’t have to deal with managing all that goes into such a system. I propose that open source software can found or created for these purposes. It would likely be a more secure and higher quality system than most proprietary systems (cough PEARSON cough). Even if the school feels they cannot handle such a system on their own, they could potentially just require the students access the homework management software and not the textbook reducing the cost to the students.

Adoption of open textbooks and OERs has been increasing in recent years. From personal experience, it’s easy to include in technical courses such as science and math courses because they are more about concepts than specific memorization. It doesn’t matter how I learn how density works, just that I learn it correctly. Things get a little more difficult with liberal arts courses where there is a specific reading with specific information that we need to discuss in class. A lot of liberal arts classes I have taken have attempted to use more free online readings when possible to try to reduce the amount of textbooks students have to pay for.

Going forward I will attempt to use and encourage professors to use open textbooks and OERs. I’m inspired to attempt to contribute to some of these OERs online, especially those in my field of programming. I believe that knowledge should always be free and OERs are some of the best ways to do it.

Resources

Are in order of appearance:

https://cnx.org/contents/Ax2o07Ul@9.98:HR_VN3f7@3/Introduction-to-Science-and-th

https://oer.psu.edu/benefits-of-using-oer/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11423-016-9434-9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX0K0hb_xKE

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/your-money/putting-a-dent-in-college-costs-with-open-source-textbooks.html

https://www.teachthought.com/technology/5-sources-of-open-source-textbooks/

Firstflight HFOSS

2018-01-24T16:04:54+00:00

Hello!

Wooo! Website exists, very exciting. This site is built on Jekyll and is hosted on GitHub Pages. For the sake of posterity some advice on setting up a jekyll site (talking to you future me who has forgotten things work!). Once you get it installed on your OS and have your GitHub Pages repo setup, then you probably want to pick a theme. If you go to your settings for the pages repo you will find a nifty option for themes, that include previews. If you want to change the theme and see it locally then change the theme section in your _config.yaml file to the theme name your using. Then if you look in your Gemfile you will find helpful comments that explain you uncomment the gem “github-pages” line and comment out the jekyll gem. If you don’t comment out the jekyll gem it will yell at you, as I found out the hard way by not reading fully.

If you want to use an usppported theme or get screwed up by GitHub’s way of doing themes (which happened to me) you can just remove the _sites directory from your .gitignore file and then add than to the repo. GitHub Pages will pull from the generated _sites folder.

Firstflight

As for the other things in the Firstflight assignment; I use Matrix now to connect to the IRC channels I’m in including #rit, #rit-foss, and #ritlug. If you too want to get setup with Matrix I suggest using Justin Flory’s tutorial as that’s how I got setup. My username there is gen1e. I’m already on the HFOSS mailing list and I have a GitHub account. I’ve also just forked the HFOSS repo.