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SLICE Applications
An application is a particular use of SLICE. Because it can be extended by writing Python scripts, SLICE can be used to create an infinite variety of applications. The following are provided with the SLICE installation. User guides and technical information are supplied on each application's page.
We hope users will find these applications useful in themselves, but we post them also as examples of what can be done in SLICE, in the hopes that users will improve upon them, as well as develop new applications.
Lecture application: This is an application of SLICE for Tablet-based presentations, particularly for classroom use. It includes the usual inking features, such as colors, highlighting, erasing, and resizing, import of PDF and PPT files, cut and paste, undo/redo, etc., as well as adding blank slides and copying slides (useful when following through an example in class). A separate version of this application is the lecture with separate display; in this application, a computer connected to the classroom display communicates over a (wireless) network with the lecturer's tablet, allowing the lecturer to carry his or her tablet around the classroom. While this will appear quite similar to the basic lecture application, because it requires networking between the teacher's tablet and the display device, it is more complicated to program and has certain restrictions in the user interface.
Code review: Students working in small groups can view each other's programs and write over them. This application was designed for use in our course CS 242, Programming Studio.
Collaborative classroom (WIPTE demo): This is an application highlighting a form of interaction between students and teacher, designed for a demo at the 2008 WIPTE (Workshop on the Impact of Pen-enabled Technology in Education). It represents one of many possible ways to use SLICE in a fully Tablet PC-equipped classroom. In this application, the teacher's ink strokes are sent to each student, the teacher can create polls (of two types), and the teacher has a "dashboard" on a separate computer that can show students' work on a particular exercise.
Alternative collaborative classroom (Spring '09): This is an application designed for a high school Algebra class. It is similar in purpose to the WIPTE demo app. However, in this application, the instructor's ink is not sent to students, and the dashboard keeps a view of the students' desktops at all times. In fact, there are a number of other features of this application that are quite specific to this class; it was designed with the goal of accommodating the teacher as much as possible, and allowing him to teach in the way he was used to teaching on paper; so it has certain quirks. (This is, of course, the very goal of the Slice project - to allow for adaptation of the application to each teacher.)