stanford hci group / symbolic systems
Supporting studio-based
design courses with
Django-courseapp
Mike Krieger · 14 November 2008 http://hci.stanford.edu

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Background
 Me
 Stanford HCI & Open source
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Need
 CS147 — Introduction to HCI
 ~160 students
 Weekly assignments (either team or
individual)
 Shared visibility of work after submission
 Multimedia embedding
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Inspiration
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by flickr user spo0ky
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What was missing?
 Individual vs group assignments
 Studio attendance, within-studio grading &
sharing
 Grading on a variety of assignment-specific
criteria
 Multimedia embedding support
 Open source solution
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How we did it in 2 weeks
 Django!
 Python rapid application development
framework
 Python Imaging Library for some of the
thumbnail code
 Offload the video hosting / sharing to Vimeo
& YouTube
 jQuery for front-end Javascript
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Django Background
 Started in 2005 by a newspaper in Kansas
 Open source
 “The Framework for perfectionists with
deadlines”
 Key features
 Clean Object-relational mapper (your Python
classes become database tables)
 Easy templating system
 Nice, clean URLs
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Object-relational mapping
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Rapid templates & forms
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Clean URL patterns
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The app
 Demo
 Creating assignment
 Using markdown for formatting
 Embedding video from YouTube
 Grading a submission
 Viewing all submissions from a studio
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Lessons Learned
 Planning ahead and doing the dev work over
summer was critical
 Students are opinionated and will have many
“wants”; trick is to prioritize them
 Your interface design does impact quality &
tone of submissions
 Likewise, if you make it easy for Teaching
Assistants to provide feedback, they will
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Next Steps
 Courseapp is available at http://
hci.stanford.edu/research/courseapp/
 Open Source
 SVN repository & trac for bug management
 Will be used in future design classes at
Stanford, and hopefully other schools
 Deploying for a different class (CS294h) this
quarter took only 2 lines of changes
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Thanks!
 Prof. Scott Klemmer for guidance
 Stanford CS dep’t for supporting the work
 Django project for letting us get this done
quickly
 Joel Brandt and Marcello Bastéa-Forte for
previous versions of course software that
were inspirational
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