[sq-education] Re: [etoys-dev] popups in project-info

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Monday 31 Aug 2009 10:45:40 pm Timothy Falconer wrote:
> Think ... 1000 projects and I have twenty minutes to try 5  
> projects ... I'm a 3rd grade teacher in the united states wondering  
> how I could include Etoys throughout my school day.
>
> 500 different ways of saying 3rd grade will all but prevent that  
> person from finding 5 great projects in 20 minutes.
This is a search problem that won't be solved with just tagging. Projects are 
not precisely structured records like database records. They are free form 
documents.

A few weeks back Yoshiki pointed that he found "EToysLauncher openPanel" slow 
because he had a few hundred projects in a folder. The method opened each 
project file to extract a thumbnail and collect them in a book!

What is needed to tackle such problem is an auto-indexer and search tool, say 
ProjectIndexMorph, that will index project collections in a folder (server) 
and display their thumbnails in a holder or book. It can have a filter field to 
narrow down displayed thumbnails and a refresh method to update the index  
when projects are updated (this can also be done automatically).

Now, teachers can search for projects that have, say "velocity", somewhere in 
their text morphs or meta-data. It will take no more than a minute to search 
1000 projects.

Subbu