Marble Exercise

Introduction

Marble Exercise is a client/server program developed by Christopher Brewer to model a real-world classroom exercise created by Dr. Ben Martz and Dr. Morgan Shepherd. The program uses well-formed HTML for the user interface, PHP for the logic layer, ASCII files for data storage, and Apache web server for content distribution.

Requirements

Software:

• Client
  • Web Browser: Any modern browser with Javascript and cookies enabled. Tested on Internet Explorer 6.0 (Windows XP), Firefox 1.0x (Windows XP and Linux), Opera 7-8 (Windows XP and Linux), Konqueror (Linux). Macintosh browsers were not tested. However, due to shared codebase with their Windows counterparts, Firefox and Opera should be fully supported on Macintosh. Additionally, Safari on Macintosh should be supported since it shares its codebase with Konqueror.
• Server
  • Apache 1.3 or greater
  • PHP 4.3 or greater
  • Operating System: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris, or other OS capable of running the aforementioned software packages.

Hardware:

This program has very modest hardware requirements. Any computer capable of running the aforementioned software packages will suffice.

Installation/Use

Step 1:

Unzip the marble_exercise.zip distribution in the HTML document directory of the computer running Apache/PHP.

Step 2:

In UN*X variants, recursively set the ownership of the resultant "marble" directory:

 chown -R apache. ./marble/ 

Step 3:

Point your favorite browser to http://cob.uccs.edu/marble/initgame.php to reset all files and prepare for a new session.

Step 4:

Instruct participants to point their browsers to http://cob.uccs.edu/marble/ and log in.

NOTE: Students will be assigned to teams in round-robin fashion. If there are three distinct teams, the first three participants logging in will be assigned as team captains. Team captains are the primary point of contact for betting and transferring clues/funds.

Administration Notes

SETUP FILES: All data such as team names, clues and marble colors are in the /marbles/source/ directory. The software automatically adjusts the number of teams based on the number of team name entries in teamnames.txt. This allows you to increase the number of available teams. If you add a new team name to teamnames.txt, create a .GIF image named after the team and place it in /marble/images. For example, if you added Epsilon as a fourth team to teamnames.txt, you would put a .GIF images called Epsilon.gif in /marble/images/.

DEMOTE CAPTAIN: You can demote a captain by adding the following to the URL in the player's browser:

 ?demote 

PROMOTE CAPTAIN: You can promote a captain by adding the following to the URL in the player's browser:

 ?promote 

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