CP3 Release Notes

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Classroom Presenter has been developed as a research project to explore the role that computers can play in supporting classroom instruction. We have endeavored to build a system that meets a few basic instructional scenarios and is robust enough that it can be deployed reliably in the classroom. However, as a research project it has limitations in the number of features that we have been able to include in the system.

User feedback has been very important for the development of Classroom Presenter. Bug reports from users have allowed us to fix many problems that we did not identify in our own testing. Feature suggestions from faculty have led to many of the most successful features of the system. Instructor notes, a preview pane associated with the filmstrip, and student submissions all had their starts as ideas from users.

Classroom Presenter 3 (CP3) is a complete rewrite of the previous version. The internal architecture is completely different, and every line of code is new. The rewrite was done to clean up a code base that had become very difficult to work with, and also to allow a fresh start on Presenter features. The functionality of CP3 is essentially the same as the previous version. The three core aspects of the system are: pen based presentation, synchronization of presentations across machines, and students submissions to support classroom activities.

Main improvements in CP3 are:

• A new implementation of inking, which gives a smoother display, and substantially reduced lag on the public display. (Ink delays can be noticeable to students watching the public display, even if the instructor is not aware of it.)
• The multicast networking was replaced by TCP/IP networking. Although a broadcast networking has the potential to deliver better performance, this was never achieved in CP2, and the poor reliability sometimes made the distributed operations unusable. The TCP/IP networking sends information to the individual machines separately -so it has the potential to saturate available bandwidth. Generally, we have been successful in deployments of about 20 machines. The scalability of CP to a large number of machines remains open.
• Powerpoint slides may be loaded directly without converting to an intermediate representation. This turns out to have a significant impact on improving the workflow (although we did not appreciate how important a step this would be).

CP3 discarded a number of features from CP2, such as scrollable ink overlays, and feedback menus. These features did not provide much value in the classroom and harmed usability.

Two other missing features from this release are a remote pointer and a polling facility. The polling facility is "on the drawing board", and we hope to add it at some point. The status of the remote pointer is uncertain - it clearly has value, but also is technically somewhat difficult to implement.

We consider the released version of CP3 to be robust and functional - but there are naturally many minor issues on our bug lists. The following shortcomings have been identified (and hopefully will be addressed).

CP3 Issues. (Version 1491).

There are a number of issues that have not been resolved (and should be considered as bugs). There are workarounds for most of these - but we hope to fix them in subsequent releases.

• Printing to PDF does not work. Very strange behavior has been observed when the printer is set to PDF.
• Display of composite images with different versions of PPT. Some images have been observed to come out as all black when pre-2007 versions of PPT are used. These images generally are composite images - one work around has been to ungroup the images inside of Powerpoint. This problem seems to be associated with the conversion routines from PPT - something that was fixed in Office2007 - but is a problem in Office2003 and OfficeXP.
• Inserted slides do no display in the slide deck. If a large group of slides is inserted into a slide deck, they may not display in the filmstrip. Both the slide deck and the number of slides needs to be large for this problem to occur (in fact, the trigger is the product of the number of slides in the deck, and the number of slides inserted).
• Opening multiple copies of the same deck causes strange behavior.

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