On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Chris Ball <c...@laptop.org> wrote: > It seems to me that > Sugar exists because we claim at least the following failings of most > educational software projects: > > * they don't allow the knowledge they contain to be *appropriated*. > * they don't allow children to be *creators* > * they don't allow learning to be *collaborated upon*
I totally agree with these, but let me add two more perhaps unstated ones. 1. Existing educational software costs a lot of *money*, or else is *poorly designed*. In my state, entire classes of elementary school students receive MacBooks from the school, loaded with advanced educational software. Even with Apple's massive discounting, the hardware + software must cost around $1500 per student. Further, a lot of the existing open source educational software is fairly weak. It's even further behind the open source desktop software, which still has a long way to go to catch up with Microsoft, Apple and the other commercial vendors. To me, Sugar represents the best effort yet to provide actual quality, cohesive educational software as free software. Some Flash animations are poorly designed, but many are not, they can be made quickly and targeted at specific educational goals. The deployments have access to trained Flash programmers who are willing to help out. 2. Existing educational software does not *run on the XO*. The XO is the cheap hardware platform we are delivering to under served children, so what software they can use to learn with must run on this limited platform. Flash programs don't run great right now, but with some tweaking I believe they could probably be made to run acceptably. Best, -Wade _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep