[Request for Feedback] Dynamo for Educational Usage

Request for Feedback
1

Hi Dynamo users,

It’s been a while since I wrote you about what’s going on with our product. We just had the biggest release ever with a lot of changes and improvements. @solamour had drafted an awesome blogpost about it here. If you have not read it and tried it out, I sincerely encourage you to do that. I am super excited about you telling us what you like or did not like in newer versions of Dynamo as I am writing now.

Back to the purpose of this topic, I would like to take the chance to request some feedback about applying Dynamo to educational use. As you guys know, Dynamo Sandbox has always been free to whoever willing to give visual programming a try. When I was picking up computer science at school, I was not exposed to visual programming at all. But looking back, if a tool like Dynamo was exposed to me, I can make very good use of it learning good concepts about programming and design. We would like to know more about what the community need in this case. If you have time, please take a moment to finish this small poll and give me additional feedback on what you think would be good additional feature to provide for educational use. Educational use here is defined as for example, using in school, self learning at home or for demonstration purposes only in the early design phase.

Among the following options, which do you like most to see available in free DynamoSandbox soon? You can choose up to 3 options, or if what you desire is not among this list, feel free to leave comments and reasons. I will add popular suggestions as additions to this poll later to increase visibility. Our team will use this poll to study Dynamo needs and how to best support Dynamo users in the coming years. Looking forward hearing from you as always.

  • DynamoSandbox available on Mac so I can define or view my graph on Mac
  • DynamoSandbox available on Pad system so I can define or view my graph on iPad
  • DynamoSandbox available as WebClient, similar to diagrams.net so I can define a graph anywhere
  • Motion control available in DynamoSandbox so graph construction and common commands can be done by fingers
  • Voice control available in DynamoSandbox so graph construction and common commands can be done by voice
  • Text to graph converter so I can convert a problem on paper to a graph, like majority of math problem can be converted into a small console program
  • More customization available in DynamoSandbox so I can make my graph or Dynamo itself unique to others’
  • More simplified node library so I can locate the nodes I want faster, e.g. hide particular category or so
  • More options to connect to other kinds of mature softwares, e.g. simulation softwares, statistics softwares
  • More predefined modules out of the box, e.g. packages with good examples and documentations or templates for particular kind of design problem

0 voters

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Cool ideas @Aaron_Tang! One thing I’ve seen over and over again on the forum is confusion when working with nested lists, list levels, and node lacing. I personally think these are some of the most powerful features of Dynamo and are foundational for anyone that wants to build a graph that handles more than one object at a time. So I think it would be really helpful to have some way to visualize how data in lists are handled. Not sure if it would be something that you could view for any node, or just a set of examples that walk through various list operations.

I’m currently taking a data structures course from Georgia Tech and they’ve created a web tool that does something similar to what I’m describing. You can play around with it here and maybe it will give you some inspiration.

https://csvistool.com/

4 Likes
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You might want to check out this Dynamo office hour: 05 - Understanding lacing in Dynamo (Dec 2020) - YouTube

Good stuff starts about 6.5 minutes into it and ends around 24 minutes. The prior and subsequent sessions are also worth reviewing as a teaching exercise.

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This is excellent, it would be very good if it were like diagrams.net and to connect with statistical software, really, this visual programming is really very good.

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Thank you for your input so far on this. I have had back and forth discussions with my team about these options. I also have spent some time implementing a voice control interface for Dynamo thinking about some educational user scenarios, e.g. Lecturer teaching visual programming in a class where he/she would like to work by interacting with Dynamo or having students interact with Dynamo. I would love to get some feedback and see if regular Dynamo users would be happy to use voice control in Dynamo on a daily basis. Appreciate your feedback and I would love to know more about what is blocking your education use these days.

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“Align top”
“Distribute X”
“Select connected nodes”

Voice to design script would be cool too…

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Thanks, good ideas! Voice to graph was my original problem space but I found that involves much more. Converting a problem described by voice to a graph which I think would be super fun consists of many more parts and each of them deserves some deep thinking. I was shooting for ‘what is 1+1>’ and Dynamo gives me the graph and the answer. And that seems a lot more difficult than I originally thought :slight_smile:

2 Likes