Kristy Parkinson and Professor Jan Dijkwel, Dance

Ballet is a technically demanding performance art. About 500 students take ballet classes each semester at Brigham Young University, and one of the most difficult parts of each ballet class is memorizing all the French terms that each step is known by. In order to facilitate this process, the head of the Ballet Division of the Dance Department, Sandra Allen, as well as Theatre Ballet director Jan Dijkwel, asked that I develop a tutorial that would present the terms, their definitions, and multimedia so that students could easily connect terms to movement. This in turn would help students as they perform in class, as well as on their written final. Sandra Allen and Jan Dijkwel agreed to provide the videos and pictures of the movements if I could develop an application for the students to use.

I started this project by creating a database of all the French ballet terms. I created the database on a web server so that it can be accessed on and off campus. Each entry in the database is a term containing information about its definition, what levels and categories the term belongs in, and what kind of multimedia is associated with it. Some terms are also linked to examples which illustrate correct and incorrect ways of executing the move. Although this database was set up and is managed by MySQL, my main purpose in this project was to build an application that would interact with database, allowing ballet faculty heads to easily manage the information in the database.

Using Revolution Dreamcard 2.5, I developed a graphical user interface to display all the information contained in the database. The hardest part of the project was finding a compact way to display the large amount of detail each term required. After several redesigns, and working with Jan Dijkwel and Sandra Allen, I developed the application as seen in figure 1. The list of all the terms is on the left. Once a term is selected, the text fields, checkboxes and buttons are adjusted to reflect its information. The user can edit the information by clicking the “Edit this Term” checkbox. I encountered two problems as I developed the application. One was the ability to cross-link terms, so that when a student encounters a term in the definition that they are unfamiliar with, they can click it and be shown its definition. In order to make these links, I developed a pop-up window to easily select the term to link to, and select the words in the definition to make the link. Another difficulty was having to scroll through a long list of terms to find the one that was desired. To deal with this, I put a search box above the list of terms, so that as the user begins typing in the box, the term starting with those letters is selected.

Sandra Allen and Jan Dijkwel were also interested in a section of the tutorial that would allow students to complete multiple choice questions such as would be on the written final. Sandra Allen provided me with all the questions for each level, and I developed another database to manage these questions. Each question has four choices, and for purposes of the database, the correct answer is always listed first. I characterized each question according to its level of difficulty, as well as the level and categories it belongs to. Similar to the terms, the questions are listed on the left, and a “Edit this Question” button allows the user to modify each question (see figure 2). However, a new problem was encountered with this list of questions. It became harder to identify a question just from the list because the questions were not in any practical order that would make it easy to find specific questions. I created a search box, so that when a term is typed into the box, all questions except those with that term are removed from the list. This made it easy for duplicate questions to be found, as well as a way to easily find any question.

The development of this database, and the application to manage the database, have been a success. Because the main frame of the database is completed, and with the help of the application, the ballet faculty will be able to dynamically edit or add information to respond to students’ needs. The updated information is immediately used in the student tutorial, so that new versions of the tutorial do not need to be made for changes in the terms. Now Jan, Sandra and I are ready to finish updating the information with pictures and videos, and to start training the ballet faculty in the use of the ballet database application.