How would the add-on analyze and rate modeling skills?
How would the add-on analyze and rate good uv-mapping and texturing skills?
Or any other serious skills like lighting, animation or rigging?
If I could earn an achievement by hitting the render button on the default opening scene, what did I earn the achievement for?
Thanks, so far this has been good for a laugh…
Randy
meh… was being polite so I wasn’t explicit – rich people and their little rich children already have all the necessary learning resources at their fingertips. If they’re not learning it’s probably because they don’t yet have a binary friend (or should that be shrink) called PlugIn to tell them “Yay!” every time they manage to punch two consecutive keys in the correct order. Those who don’t have broadband (and a desktop littered with debris from macdonalds) need instructions in a format that downloads relatively fast and is portable between platforms since they may well still be using win 95 - something like .txt
I am not too keen on the idea of 'achievement’s in the Xbox Live sense, but some way of mapping out the feature set and allowing you to see discover areas of blender you have not yet noticed would be useful. But it would be a lot of work to create!
First and foremost is some good coherent documentation.
The add-on doesn’t analyze good or bad, I’m starting to wonder how teacher do this…
The add-on just tells you (informs you) about where there are tutorials, how long they take, and whether you’ve already done similar manipulations.
Currently to keep it simple the idea is to have a script look into your log files seeing every function you’re ever used, and the order in which it has been used, if order(functions used)=true for achievement (x) with tutorial (y) you get the achievement.
Some other people (like me) like to try out tutorials but you never know beforehand how long it’s going to take (-ish) and especially having a clear short central list has proven to been done before ( http://gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html ).
Let me just make an analogy, the idea of this add-on is more to be a kind of “quest giver”, whenever you feel like doing a tutorial you can access it and see which tutorials match your “5 minutes/animation tutorial” slot, without having to keep an eye on blendernation/blenderguru/blenderlabrat/a gaszillion other sites… I know the add-on will probably lag behind the available tutorials, so please stop jabbing crowbars into the idea and start having a look at it and make constructive suggestions 
Back to code (whey).
While having a tally of things you have and haven’t done could be useful, repetition and reinforcement is incredibly important in learning. Having a message tell you that you’ve already done something before may not always be so great, since taking more opportunities to focus purely on a particular task can be quite helpful in understanding its workings and usage.
I personally believe that there is great potential in using conventions developed by games to help in the learning process, particularly the interactivity. The advantage of having a live tutor over a written or video tutorial is that a person can help you along should you mess up, whether it be because you toyed with an input field you shouldn’t have or you simply didn’t perform an action correctly. I think having a way for people to make interactive tutorials could really help people trying to become familiar with Blender. It’s not quite the same as a live tutor but I think it could be considerably more effective that switching back and forth between a list of instructions/video and blender following step by step and being at a total loss when your results do not match the script you are following.
I made a brief thread on it in the python board but I am not a coder and thus I only have a very minimal conception of how one would implement this. I’ll quote myself.
For the person following an interactive tutorial, it would be like: a pop-up appears explaining a concept/action, there would be some kind of visible cue to help a person locate what it is talking about (such as an arrow pointing to a menu item or an input field glowing or a wire-frame), they would then perform said action (the action being a ghost of a recording the creator made for playback). Then once that action is done it moves on to the next task, with new text and visual cues; this process continues until the tutorial’s completion.
I’d imagine that there would be some room for error in following actions, since when following a modeling tutorial expecting someone to set vertices down to exact coordinates would be silly(unless it’s for some technical modeling, but perhaps in when opening a tutorial it will automatically set presets for that file such as “lock to grid” so that a person doesn’t need to worry about details unrelated to the primary purpose of the lesson.).
What about a popup dialogue,like:
You pressed the <insert buton here> for the first time!
The ___ button is mainly used for A and B and works a bit like <insert metaphor here>
<Cool!> <Don’t show again>