YupGrade For JetPack

The Development Team

James Levy (Developer) & Julia Schofield (Designer)

About YupGrade

YupGrade lets users challenge each other to see who can best keep up with current events such as news about an unfolding crisis, or an environmental cause, or a local political story.

When you have a YupGrade profile, any newsworthy links you share links on Twitter or Facebook popup on your YupGrade profile and are given a grade that updates in real-time over the next few hours. The highest grade bonuses are given out for when you post about a trending topic before it reaches critical mass.

We're working on supporting rewards like e-editions of books and magazines that can be downloaded by winners when they win a challenge.

YupGrade Jetpack

Link: Install the YupGrade Jetpack

Open-Source Code & API

The YupGrade Jetpack code is hosted on Github.

Extensibility will require public API methods allowing topics, experts, and other YupGrade data related to a page to be queried. A simple API is one of the major TODO items for the next release.

JetPack Features

Breaking News Panel

The YupGrade Jetpack Panel pops up whenever you visit a newsworthy article, blog post, or video.

Suggested Topics and Experts

When you visit a newsworthy article, video, or blog post, a panel preview links to related topics and experts. This can help you find other YupGrade users to challenge, and it can also help you complete challenges you've already started.

Social Media Shortcuts

The panel includes Twitter and Facebook shortcuts that help you post links so you can complete YupGrade challenges and earn rewards for your inventory.

Quiz Taking Component

We've decided to delay integration of the quiz component to the next major release, since it will be a substantial amount more work to prepare it for a public release.--Jamtoday 07:28, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

The original goal for the JetPack For Learning Challenge was to integrate the quiz interface shown above into a browser extension that would automatically create quizzes for most sufficiently text-filled pages on the web by analyzing their content, and using Wikipedia pages in combination from outside data RDF-compatible datasets to create fill-in-the-blank quizzes.

This idea of creating quizzes from webpages is also found in Jetpack for Learning entries ClozeFox and Study Troll. The common assumption driving each of these projects is that by providing immediate ways to provide self-assessment, we can impact learning by creating new repeatable, integrated behaviors.

There are several noteworthy similarities and differences between approaches. The YupGrade Quiz UI currently renders in a lightbox dialog with a modal covering the document behind it. The ClozeFox interface uses dragdown input boxes and other HTML-based UI widgets to fashion a page simply be editing and augmenting the DOM of the page. There is certainly merit to this idea, especially to best take advantage of the APIs made available and the always improving performance of DOM manipulation.

We face a few major difficulties in the goal of automatically creating reliably high-quality assessments. Some of this is related to the way we grade a user's quiz results, and we've got some great ideas about how to handle these issues (see the grading specification for details). But there are plenty of pedagogical dilemmas and engineering hurdles that we're also facing.

This is precisely why we decided to go back to our roadmap and plan to approach the extension in layers, starting off with very simple functionality and iterating on more improvements. The quiz back-end will undergo development in parallel, so that the final portion of development can be devoted to porting the quiz interface to the extension.

Mockups