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Pavlov Project Help Wanted Page
- Contributing (your time) to Pavlov
- Be an Active User
- Write a Pluglet
- Do Science
- Hack The Core
- Steal This Code
Contributing (your time) to Pavlov
There are many many ways that you, yes you can get involved in the Pavlov project. Here are a few:
Be an Active User
If you could get your browser to this web page, you should be plenty savvy enough to use Pavlov productively and think of things that need to be done, and ways it can be used in your world.
- Show it to your teacher.
- Submit your questions to this site so others can benefit from your work.
- Write an essay on Pavlovian Conditioning or Operant Conditioning.
- Look in the forum and see if you can help other users get started, or make suggestions.
- Let us know if you nailed the spelling test or your dissertation defense with Pavlov's help.
The sky's the limit!
Write a Pluglet
Pavlov's strengths lie in the pluggable nature of its feedback and question selection strategies. Pavlov would be a lot more user-friendly, and useful, with 100 pluglets available instead of 15. Someone new to programming in Java or programming period could very well write pluglets. I'd recommend this: go to java.sun.com and download Java (the name will be something like "J2SE1.5.0B..."). Look through their documentation on how to write an Applet. (Applets and Pluglets are not the same thing, but they're kissing cousins.) Then come back here and look at the Pluglet documentation. A lot of things will look familiar. Then do what every new programmer does when in a new environment: read the documentation and experiment. It's a lot of fun.
Do Science
I'd love to have a professional educator or psychologist do a case study on Pavlov.
Hack The Core
There is need for experienced programmers to improve and expand the core Pavlov code. It's mostly in good shape, but there are API modifications and implementation cleanups lurking around that another pair of eyes would see before I would. Expansion brings up some really interesting problems, like how to use AbstractUIFactory to run Pavlov on a Palm-Pilot, how to back data to a RDBMS, how to implement in various client-server settings, etc. There are cobwebs in some packages that really need to be swept away.
Steal This Code
Well, use it in accordance with the GNU General Public License, but it's almost the same thing. The best way to see if an API is flexible enough is to try to use it in a completely different setting. I've had to make about 6 changes in writing BEE, which is almost exactly the same application as Pavlov.
