Author: 0xe5cf1bb88a59f9fc609689c681d1d14bfe7ce73a
Update Status: On Time
Project Health: 
On Track
Introduction
This month is month 3 of 4. We have been finishing off the bulk of the implementations and moving into a heavy QA process which in turn has resulted in rounds of bug fixes, usability improvements and other enhancements that we did not foresee before the QA process started.
Big focus has been on the creation of the Scene templates and example content. This has resulted in us moving from the static content we demonstrated on Testing Tuesday to more dynamic content with which students can interact.
Highlights
The NPM Package has reached a good level of maturity and is well organised and structured.
- We have integrated a code documentation framework which lets us produce and stay on top of API documentation for developers.
- The reference test server is functional and sceneTemplate2 has been engineered to use it.
- The ServerExamples example scene demonstrates how a custom server can be implemented - proving that our design pattern for the Server Abstraction is good.
- The Smart Contract is mature and is heavily unit tested which means the tweaks we have been able to make can be done with confidence and proof that one change doesn’t impact on anything else in the contract.
- We have introduced a new Teachers Contract, so allow Teachers to publish their classroom content on chain. This allows them to specify all the various content units for a class, and stores it. The classroom then reads that content on chain. We are using IPFS to publish the teachers content.
- The dApp provides the front end on the Teachers content publishing and allows them to do things like give a name/caption to each element of their class.
- SceneTemplate1 has been through the scrutiny of QA thoughout November and we continue with the test / refine cycle. There is not much left to do/fix on this.
- SceneTemplate2 follows the evolution of SceneTemplate1 and applies server control to that instead of peer to peer communications.
- We have expanded the example classroom content to contain polls, simple quizzes and interactive 3d content. We will continue to make more example content as part of the QA process.
- Documentation has been progressing well, with Teacher’s documentation taking good shape, and we have a publishing pipeline established for the code/NPM documentation to be published in Github along with the code - which will we be utilising in the core developer documentation where we will link as needed to the technical reference from the rest of the developers help pages published in GitHub.
- Creation of the Community Venue. This really pushes the NPM Package to a publicly usable level by having advanced features such as multiple classrooms in a scene and classrooms that are stacked vertically.
- The 3D Modelling of the Community Venue is complete and the scene is deployed in Decentraland University in Peer testing.
- We have gone into production with the dApp - we have a publishing pipeline which pushes to a serverless cloudflare deployment which is available at https://liveteach.io - this is currently pointing at the Goerli network, and will very soon be transitioned to Mainnet.
Blockers
We have no blockers, but the QA process flushed out some usability issues which have led to a few more development tasks. Specifically in helping the teacher navigate through the content. The end result will be better for teachers but it means we continue developing some elements of this in early December that we had aimed to have completed by the end of November.
Next steps
We we enter the final month of the project funded by this grant we have the following major items to take this stage of LiveTeach to completion:
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The NPM Package is publishing according to a major/minor release version format which is controlled by which branch we publish to NPM from. By the end of December we will establish what the ‘major’ version number will be for what we launch with.
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We are now in production for the dApp, the final major task there is to switch from Goerli Network to Ethereum mainnet, leaving our UAT environment running on Goerli, and the live website pointing to Mainnet. We will have small incremental fixes and enhancements to the dApp UI throughout December in coordination with the QA process that it is going thorough.
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DCL have fixed the issues with controlling scene emotes which has impaired the development of the seating manager. We now have had a favourable QA process on seating and we have a few tickets with some edge cases that we need to address to get it behaving perfectly.
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We will continue enhancing the example class content that we are shipping with. We have added interactive content such as polls and quizzes. So we have a little bit more to do on that in order to ship with examples that show off the full capabilities of the platform.
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Completion of the 3 scene templates, with the Worlds Template being an adaptation of SceneTemplate 1.
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One of the very last jobs to do is the creation of the Worlds Scene template, which we decided to delay slightly until the SceneTemplate1, on which the worlds template is based, is perfected. We are very close to that.
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The Community Venue is the absolute priority for week 1 in December as that represents the culmination of all the work we have done into a flagship venue. We really see this as the milestone of completion, and beyond that it will be closing any lose ends - such as refining example content, finishing off the documentation, engaging with the community to get them involved and show them how they will be able to utilise the venue we have created.
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We are running regular internal test sessions we are close to making those public so that the community will be able to see the final stages of this taking shape during December.
Additional notes and links
The dApp is live (but not quite ready for public scrunity (so we won’t promote it yet in the Discord) at https://liveteach.io - The documentation is only partially published to this version and it is running on the Goerli Network so doesn’t yet correspond to real live Land ownership / operator rights.