[huda_koulani]

Hello,

I came across this post and I have a question regarding this info:
<p style=”box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 1.5em; line-height: 1.6; word-break: break-word; color: #404040; font-family: lato, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;”>6. Is there logging of user steps — when things are added to a spreadsheet, or what operations were done, timestamped? We’re thinking through chain of custody questions for environmental sampling, but this could also be useful for “recording” a sequence of analysis steps for playback or “guided analysis.”</p>
<p style=”box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 1.5em; line-height: 1.6; word-break: break-word; color: #404040; font-family: lato, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;”>> [Jonathan] Yes, all user initiated actions are timestamped and logged to a log server on an activity by activity basis. Mostly, these log entries are effectively anonymous, but they can be  correlated with users in a controlled environment.</p>
Is there a documentation on how to access this log on user actions? We are planning to integrate CODAP as an iFrame in an educational environment und it would help the scaffolding process to track user actions and make suggestions based on that.

Thanks and best regards

Huda

[Dan Damelin]

Huda, can you give us more details about what you are planning? Are you publishing a commercial product? How many users would you be expecting to explore logs for? Is this a temporary project or something that would expect to be available long term?

[huda_koulani]

Hello Dan,

 

Thank you for your response.

 

The tool we are planning is purely an educational tool and would be published after the end of our project as an Open Educational Resource.

 

The use case of the tool is to develop data skills of school students and we want to deploy CODAP as the data analysis tool in this context. It would support the scaffolding process, if CODAP could expose user actions such as Graph was created, Map was altered, Data Table was deleted and other usual user actions in CODAP env, so that our tool processes these actions and provide scaffolding steps according to that.

As the idea is to publish the tool after development, it should be available long term. As of the number of users, we are talking about using it within school classes, so the tool would have to process actions from about 20 users in the same time.

 

Does CODAP provide such information about user actions?

 

I hope these information could clarify my goal a little bit more. Please let me know if there are some aspects that are not clear yet.

 

Best regards,

Huda

[Dan Damelin]

Hi Huda,

Those kinds of user actions are logged, but the log events are anonymized so it would currently be impossible to pull out a specific stream of log events from our logs.

You have three options:

1. We discuss a contract to extend CODAP to allow for an optional input that would be passed on as part of each log event. Then we could extract log reports from our database for you and have events grouped by that input value. Your system could pass whatever input value you wanted to attach to the logs (like a student ID).
2. Host and run your own version of CODAP. Modify it so that you can inject some information about the user. Capture your own logs to your own server.
3. Write a small plugin for CODAP that would monitor CODAP for events you care about and send those to your own log server. It might be possible for the plugin to retrieve some information about the student who is using your platform, so that information could be added to your own logs. This “plugin” could be code that runs in the webpage that is embedding CODAP rather than the traditional style of having an iframed plugin sitting inside of CODAP, which would also work.

I would recommend #3. It would require someone on your end to write the code for the plugin and to maintain your own database of log events, but with AI coding assistance this kind of thing is now possible for many with only minimal technical skills required. We have information about how to create plugins on our website and would be happy to answer questions.

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