[OSM-dev] GSOC 2015 Introduction

[Arjun Krishna]

Hello Everyone,
 Hey, I was going through the ideas  for GSOC '15 and the Learning
platform for Overpass API really caught my eye. I have some experience
in web-development mostly Django and some Javascript and some of it's
brilliant libraries along with the usual HTML,CSS .
I had some ideas on how this can be implemented, here they go.

The idea for teh learning platform mentioned something like codeacademy.
The process of learning in code academy involves this
    1.You signup for a course and find a bunch of chapters in that course.
    2.You can go chapter by chapter or skip to the chapter you want.
    3.Then they teach you a little by showing an example and a few
lines explaining it or just the explanation.
    4.Then you have to solve a problem , they check if you solved it
by looking at your output (console logs in javascript)
    5.You move on to other chapters.
   Code academy is great if you want to learn something from top to
bottom, however if you just want to get a small doubt cleared
codeacademy is not the place.
   I think this is where something like w3schools comes in, they're
great to use when you have to just clear up a small detail about
javascript or something else.
   One of the major differences between codeacademy and w3schools is
that w3schools does not validate your answer, there is no problem to
solve in w3schools just examples. In code academy there are mostly
problems to solve.
   Many users may want to start from scratch to learn the overpass api
and many of them may just want to clear a small doubt up.
   I suggest that something like w3schools but also with dedicated
courses like codeacademy would be great(Best of both worlds).
   Coming towards coding up such a platform one of the main questions
is whether to use overpass turbo or not.
   Overpass turbo is great for building queries and running them ,
however testing the output obtained in order to ensure that the user
solved the problem    might be hard(Or atleast thats what I think ,
not too sure, have been thinking of ways to  use it and develop over
it)
   I suggest that  overpass turbo be used when just examples have to
be showcased and use the platform and leafleft.js(To show the output)
when problems are being solved.

   PS: Here's something that I started writing just to familiarize
myself with leaflet.js [http://hastebin.com/exegisukef.xml] , I was
just trying to show the query results on a map(I know it's ugly ,
excuse the looks please and it works only for nodes now).

PPS: My linked in profile , https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=316690794