Fluffy Tree: The Future of Ivanhoe

On Tuesday, we launched Ivanhoe 1.0. As Scott noted yesterday, much of the PHP which drives our Ivanhoe Wordpress theme is the product of our many hours spent in the Scholars’ Lab pair-programming.

Now that Ivanhoe 1.0 is out in the world, Scott and I have settled down to tackle the next feature: fluffy tree.

(Minotaur Scott & Ammit Veronica tackle Fluffy Tree Bunny)

Fluffy tree will enable users to respond to multiple moves at once, thereby creating a broader network of connections within each game. The feature name arose from a conversation we and the Scholars’ Lab developers had early in the semester about how to conceptualize the Ivanhoe game within the blog-based structure of WordPress - we didn’t want a ‘vine,’ with one move linking to the next in a linear/hierarchical fashion, but a ‘fluffy tree,’ in which moves intertwined with one another in an organic fashion.

To write the code for fluffy tree, we have had to take a jumbled mess of potential connections and turn it into a clear, linear progression of events. This has required a lot of white-board time and adding JavaScript to our programming repertoire. While we do not yet have fluffy tree working, we have definitely figured out how to work on it - and really, knowing how to work collaboratively is a goal in itself.