I'm helping a colleague explore evaluate Tinderbox for possible purchase.  

The goal of the TBX would be generate a weekly list of "drills" or "exercises" for the students to accomplish.  Each student would have an individual web page that listed their drills for the week with urls to the videos, audio files, etc.  

I would set that up in the following way:

John Doe
      Week 1 (10 min)
                Exercise 1 (duration 5 min)
                Exercise 8 (duration 5 min)

Jane Doe (15 min)
       Week 1
                Exercise 1 (duration 10 min)
                Exercise 2 (duration 5 min)


So, the prototypes would be

- Student (attributes: first name, last name, etc. display expression= total exercise time)
- Exercise (attributes: duration, audio file, video link, instructions, etc)

If all of the exercises were the same duration for all of the students, no problem.  I would recommend just making an alias of each exercise and dragging it into the appropriate container.  Since the duration of the exercise is going to change based on the individual and the week, I was thinking the only way to accomplish this would be to create a different prototype for each exercise.  The problem is there are hundreds of possible exercises.  The $text and attributes of the $url will be identical-- the only thing that changes is the duration.

I think I can get this solution to "work" but having 100 prototypes might be cumbersome.  

The other solution would be to have a container filled with possible exercises.  The teacher would then duplicate the exercise and drag it into the appropriate container.  I suppose you could create some sort of action to rename it in such a way that you don't have Exercise 2 Copy.  Some of the basic patterns would repeat, so it might not be a big deal to duplicate several from a prior week and move it into another student container.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.  After writing all of this out, I think I will suggest the last solution. . . copy/paste existing exercises.

Thanks!

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the response. . . I'm not sure I understand it yet.  

Yes, their would be an attribute for minutes because assigning this to each exercise is important.  

Let me back up a step:  If there were 100 different exercises would there be 100 different prototypes?

The instructions, links, etc. are identical but the time spent on the exercise varies depending on what the student needs to achieve mastery.  For example, John has worked extensively on Exercise 1 and needs to review for 5 minutes.  Jane needs to spend 20 minutes on Exercise 1.  The content of the exercise is identical.   The frequency and duration change.  

What do you think of the copy and paste method?

Quote:
 The teacher would then manually change the minutes for each exercise.

Thanks,
Steve

Thanks for the help on the forum. I definitely would see a prototype for the student and the factor aspect makes sense.  

The question that I'm trying to get to is how to re-cycle or re-use notes. In the syllabus project that you helped created for me, there were common elements activity, homework task, etc.

In this project you could reduce the notes to two main prototypes. . .

- Song ($SongTitle, $SongArtist, $Audio, $URL
- Exercise ($dateassigned, etc)

So the teacher has a collection of songs and exercises that need to be assigned to students.

- Clocks
- Stairway to Heaven
- etc. Hundreds more

- The Minor Pentatonic Scale
- The Blues Scale
- Aeolian Mode
- etc. . .


Jane
- Clocks 5 min
- Blues Scale 10 min
- Stairway to Heaven 5 min

John
- Stairway to Heaven 10 min
- Blues Scale 5 min

So how do you re-use "Stairway to Heaven?"  It certainly comes from the song prototype.  Does it become a sub-protoype?  Is from a container called songs and it is duplicated each time a student uses it?  Is it an alias and you figure out another way to track the assignment for time?

Thanks, again.  Sorry if this is theoretical-- I was just trying to help a colleague decide if Tinderbox would be a good fit for his needs.  From what I can tell, it cold be awesome if I could suggest how to set it up properly.