HISTORY

[n.b. Most repositories don't come with a HISTORY file. README,
INSTALL, BUGS, COPYING yes but no HISTORY file. I for one, would love
to know the history of a project. Heck, even if things got too complex
to easily maintain a history file, I'd be ok with just reading what
was recorded in the beginning. No?]

ivy
===

Originally written in PHP ivy was rewritten in Ruby on Rails
(1.2.3). Here, ivy is being re-written in Ruby on Rails 4.1.0 as the
upgrade would be more difficult than a re-write.

[nb. While ivy was used daily both by myself and other teachers, I
should stress that, in terms of the general public, ivy is [beta
software.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Beta)]

Personal Background
-------------------

From about 2003 until 2008, I was a music teacher. I also happened to
be a software developer so when I got frustrated with the problems of
Blackboard & Firstclass I wrote my own software. First in PHP and then
in Rails. If I recall correctly, I made the switch because I was
frustrated with how unorganized the PHP code was and I had recently
heard about Ruby on Rails. Muuuuuch better.

Overview
--------

Originally I wrote ivy to help with the logistics of teaching. It
helped with attendance and note-taking. Then I added the ability to
plan and schedule and incorporated the ability to track
activities. This subtle change actually turned ivy into a curriculum
development tool. I could scan backwards in time within a specific
class as well as through the years, to help figure out what might work
best for my current group of students.

At this point, activities are represented simply as names although
adding further descriptions as well as what materials each activity
require would be good.

The basic idea is to log which activity or activities were used during
class and to also take notes on the success of each class/activity. Of
course, this should be done as soon as possible so you don't forget -
if possible, I'd do it during class, otherwise, I'd do it between
classes.

Educational Note
----------------

One of the benefits with activity-based education is that you're
putting what works before what you think the students need. You
cannot, of course, teach someone something that they do not care to
learn about. Not easily, at least. Those activities that are more
successful will be selected for, those less gradually eliminated or
changed. Kind of like evolution.

Design Note
-----------

I believe that, in general, the smaller and simpler things are the
better. Certainly from an energy-use standpoint. If the user has to
upload all sorts of cute little gifs and other graphics and whatnot,
it simply takes more energy. Sure, it might not be a lot, per
person. But it adds up. And why use more energy if it's not really
necessary? Soooo, all things & functionalities being equal, I'm
actually trying to reduce the amounts of bytes sent across the
internet with my design.