TeamIphone
Vermont EPSCoR's Streams Project; A Teacher Collaboration on WikiEducator
Openly shared content, practices, and developing resources from Vermont EPSCoR's Streams Project. Join this collaboration and make a difference!
Contents
Welcome Computer Science Collaborators!
This page is intended to facilitate communication between the University of Vermont programers and the Wikieducators based at Saint Michael's College.
Collaborative Wish List
About content
Currently the App about page is static and there are typos. We'd like to instead pick up the content from this page.
State names for streams
The existing Iphone app was established to cover streams in Vermont, New York, and Puerto Rico. We have since had requests for a site in Massachusetts and we can't anticipate where else a request may come from. It would be an improvement if the new app picked up the location of the river right from the river's wiki site. We use a consistent format in the river wiki sites to indicate the state thus: |State or Province= Vermont. In the existing app, if we enter Massachusetts as a location, the app drops that site.
Genus name
Each organism is a species within a genus within a family. Humans are Homo sapian; the species is sapian within the genus Homo and we are in the family Hominidae along with the other great apes. In stream insects we rarely identify larvae to species so we work mostly at the family and genus level.
On the wiki site we identify some things to family and some to genus. We have collaborating schools who work only at the family level so we have created templates at each level to match the needs of our collaborators.
Currently the app has fixed fields for family and for genus. It would improve the app if, when we leave the genus information blank on the wiki, the app simply dropped that field entirely rather than presenting the word Genus followed by a blank.
Common names and tied fly names
In response to multiple requests from teachers, we'd like to add common names. In anticipation of expanding the usefulness of the app for fly fishers, we'd also like to add the names of tied flies that can be used to match the organisms found in the streams.
Not all insects have common names and tied flies have not been made to mimic all insects. So frequently these two fields will be blank. As with the genus note above, we'd like for these fields simply not to show up when they are left blank on the wiki.
Below-the-fold content in Macroinvertebrate templates
Each river site is assembled from a series of Macroinvertebrate templates. On newspapers, pride-of-place for the best stories is above the fold on page one. We are in the process of modifying each invertebrate template to mimic this situation.
Above the fold content will be information that a student at a field site with a magnifying glass might find useful. Below the fold information will include those features you'd need a microscope to see and also hotlinks to photographs. We don't intend to package all of the functional links and linked photographs on the Iphone app. But currently those inactive links show up as text in the app.
Moving forward we'd like the app to stop right before the following text content: <!--Stop-->. This simple markup code will not be visible to the typical wiki user but will be seen in the source code.
Updated templates
The SMC team members are in the process of updating the templates to reflect the functionality we have described above. In an ideal world the new app will be able to handle unmodified templates as well as modified templates. The modifications don't seem to crash the old app so we are working through them one at a time. So far we have modified the following templates: template:Chironomidae
More will be added as time permits.
Stream sites to play with
We made one site to look like our new format: Practice_Brook
