[Sugar-devel] Proposal for OUI :- an Obvious User Interface
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Design_Team/Proposals#Proposal_for_.22OUI.22_:-_an_Obvious_User_Interface ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] python-speaking unix-guru user interface prototype implementer(s) and design critics/contributors solicited
(re Peru): The current UI implementation is expected to evolve quickly and our goal is to have a 1.0 release by December 2012 with main functionality. kidie http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Design_Team/Proposals would require many design/implementation/benchtest iterations before it could be ready for a field test and i doubt it could be ready by Dec (and may never get off the ground...). attempt to create entire desktop environment should not be dominant effort on Sugar Labs level agree that the desktop metaphor, for all its excellence for desk jockeys, is not the best metaphor for learning. and yes, sugar labs seems to be only about sugar implementation development, not about rethinking its look and feel. there doesnt appear to be a maillist or forum for xo ui design or development methodology so i created a wiki talkpage: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Talk:Design_Team/Proposals As regard the activity icons on the home page (as several people have responded already) we haven't observed this as being a major problem with Sugar in the field. i don't have the benefit of having seen an xo in the hands of a child, just my own quick look at soas, and just my first impressions at that. maybe kids can learn the icons quickly and so can just skip from it to the apps so in practice it's not a hurdle from them. but i am still left with the feeling that it could be more task-oriented than feature-oriented. perhaps it's just me. It has been oft observed that children will push buttons in order to find out what they do, as oppose to adults, who like to know what buttons do before they push them. just as a baby will try to taste anything within reach: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0iQFKYSCj0 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mef5XN_TXfU that could be an argument in favour of having fewer buttons so that useful learning (through app-activities) can begin and just playing around with sugar itself doesnt become the main consumer of time. i havent yet found out where online, if anywhere (other than promo videos), xo users themselves talk about their experiences but would like to hear what they have to say. the proof of the pudding is in the user's eating of it. eg, how long (statistically) before the novelty wears off? In a recent study in Ethiopia, it was reported that kids explored thousands of activities per month. This was all done through clicking on icons (Android in this case) to see what they do. a thousand activities per kid per month is 50 activities per day for a 20-day month. counting logs of activity starts are as meaningful as counting page hits - it only tells you whether your advertising to get them to that activity (page) worked - it doesnt tell you whether they bought anything. just like i had to resort to pushing every button in sight on soas - it's the only way one can find out what the hieroglyphic icons mean, then i have to remember which one is which - it's like exploring a maze which is at first a fun thing to do in and of itself, but it's not what i would call, using Heidegger's phrase, readiness to hand of a useful tool. by the way, it was only by pushing buttons all over the maze of documentation in olpc wikis and sites that i finally stumbled upon where the sugar look and feel came from in the first place: http://new.pentagram.com/2006/12/new-work-one-laptop-per-child/ i agree with (Gericke's?) intention of making community a theme but his choice of abstract icons rather than semiotic images/words are rather too abstract art style for me; i prefer an impressionistic art style that gives you the feel of what it's about rather than making you guess what the painter intended. Picasso's famous retort to an incurious observer was: it means whatever you want it to mean!. Facebook and Ipad are examples of impressionistic interfaces which help you see straight away what you can do; as such, they are useful artworks. Abstract art, is, by definition, not intended to have a specific utility. That's why roadsigns in Malaysia that mean danger say !AWAS! and not some abstract icon that could be misinterpreted beware of low-flying English motorcycles http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Beware_of_low_flying_motorcycles.jpg one of our goals is to instill a discipline of reflection Suggestions as to how to make it more compelling most welcome. in one of your videos, you mentioned a school in a disadvantaged neighbourhood that got good results and used diarising as one of its practices and you were impressed by that. personally, i guess that diarising was incidental to their success, which i would put down more to the constructive and supportive attitudes of their teachers than anything else (not that i have any knowledge of what went on in that particular school - it's just a general correlation). as a general principle, i am not in favour of discipline of any kind as an educational methodology. I perceive
[Sugar-devel] conversations about sugar ui design
this note embraces several different emails from Aleksey and Walter What you see on http://network-testing.sugarlabs.org is a first rough and implementation for webui, you have put quite some effort into presenting your sketches, Aleksey: whilst that is in itself impressive, i'm not keen on the sketches themselves: using icons instead of words is presumably an attempt to make the ui accessible to the illiterate, but in my view it only complicates matters. icons would be effective if they were universally obvious a priori, but that is not possible - icons have to be learned just as do the symbols of any alphabet. mother tongue is preferable, as it contributes to the learning of literacy useful in the broader context of the language world within which they live. a single release of a ui could have a feature that allows the ui to be displayed in any of the languages that have been implemented. the choices of names are developer-oriented rather than user-oriented: for example, the name turtle-art makes sense only to people who are already familiar with Logo. Whereas, draw a picture (or its translation) would make sense to any kid who can read her mother tongue. for those who can't read, a thumbnail of a half-finished painting and a brush might work - it would take up more pixels than an icon, but i don't think there should be many app-triggers on view at the same time. with 69 apps already mooted (and presumably a thousand more waiting to be added), that creates a navigation issue which needs to be addressed. i feel that it could be done by creating categories of activity (such as learn, play and meet) and subcategories etc, making a simple tree structure (or maybe a network with cross-links). the one thing i am sure of is that trying to put buttons for everything on one screen creates information overload. I've been thinking for quite some time that we need a new approach to the problem of toolbar items following off the end of the toolbar .A simple solution would be to double the vertical size of the toolbar and wrap the icons onto a second row. perhaps there are too many tool buttons on screen at the same time! - but in general, one way to display long lists of items is to use scrolling, whether by mouse or finger slide - if the scrolled list were an imaginary wheel viewed edge-on with, say, half a dozen items in view at any one time, you wouldnt need a scrollbar, just a single button to rotate it (or a wheel mouse, which i find quite handy for scanning up and down lines of text). The model we have been using is one of imagine and realize and critique and reflect. sounds good but these are things that a kid would do within an activity (aka app) - getting to that activity should not require detective work. The Sugar learner engages in the cycle of activities by using the Sugar tools as individual building blocks, ah if the objective were to produce sugar-literacy, that would make sense, but if sugar were merely a tool to facilitate learning of things that are going to be of use to the kid in the outside world, then every effort should be made to make sugar itself as transparent as possible, rather like google chrome tries to get out of the way just as internet explorer tries to get in the way with thousands of toolbars The Sugar Journal and Portfolio are the tools that tie things together, speaking as a child, i dont want to have to tediously write up what i learned today since i am more focussed on the present and future than on the (even immediate) past. i would much rather my robot friend remembered for me what i had done with it today so tomorrow i can pick up from where i left off. if i were using a paper workbook and a crayon, everything i had written in it today would still be there tomorrow so i wouldn't need to rewrite or precis it for my parents. speaking as a former schoolchild (and having scanned the subtitles of the Argentinian movie and agreeing with its points but being disappointed by its lack of practical suggestion), here is the full list of everything i remember i learned from my entire 12 years of class-bound regimented schooling: 1. the chemistry teacher gives marks for tidy handwriting 2. robin hood had a bow that could shoot around corners 3. Miss Moss uses too much lipstick 4. the frog has a muscular penis 5. our history teacher was pretty 6. Shakespeare's porter at the gates of Hell was being lewd when he says that'll roast your goose and here is a partial list of things that i wish i had been taught at the time: 1. why some kids become bullies 2. why some teachers become bullies 3. the cost of living 4. what girls want 5. why my parents want me to do this or that 6. how to repair a bicycle and one thing above all else that i wish kids in rural villages were taught: small cuts develop into festering tropical ulcers unless they are cleaned and protected from bacterial invasion while the neighborhood is where the group interaction occurs.
Re: [Sugar-devel] Fwd: sugar ui + learning language
comprehensive reply Edward, thanks. and thanks Fred for sorting out my wiki cursor for me. but the cursor i'd really like users to be able to personalise is the one on the sugaronastick ui. re programming: i am not a programmer any more. it was fun when i was 16 in 1965, but i breathed a sigh of relief in 1976 when i finished my PhD and said to myself thank goodness i dont have to write any more programs! as it happens, i did write some Smalltalk (in Xerox's The Analyst) in 1988 and some Nexpert and other stuff in 1994. so you might say that i understand the lot of a programmer and wouldnt make outrageous demands of developers, but i am unable/unwilling to contribute to code myself. rather, i would like to contribute ui design ideas and some ideas on language learning aids/tools/methods. on that subject, you mention, in regard to my comment about the ton of language stuff already out there: Indeed, although we have generally found existing software not to be suited for schoolchildren. i was referring not to software, but to videos and other materials. i've mentioned it elsewhere, but i reckon that to learn a language at any age requires being able to speak to another human. everyone starts learning language from age 0 but xo is maybe suitable only for us once we have some finger dexterity at around age 3 maybe... aibo would be a good vehicle for language learning software, or an xo driven robot??... re mailists; i think forums with threads are a better medium for communication content retention i will browse the links you provided Edward, and get back to you individually on them later curricula must change when computers radically change what schoolchildren are capable of learning computers wont change what people are capable of learning (only evolution can do that), but they can help people learn more quickly and internet enables us to step beyond the mind of a schoolroom teacher. but computer use can also inhibit learning of other things if it becomes obsessive. as for curricula, i have radical viewshttps://sites.google.com/site/djhbrown2/SCHOOLS.RTF?attredirects=0d=1about that but olpc must work within the context of what civic authorities set in order to benefit the kids who are the objects (not the subjects!) of those authorities. revolutions in education take centuries, not decades. a week is a long time in politics, but a century is a blink of the eye in the evolution of social structures and their memes. david On 12 August 2012 11:36, moku...@earthtreasury.org wrote: Welcome. On Thu, August 9, 2012 10:18 pm, David Brown wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: David Brown djhbr...@gmail.com Date: 10 August 2012 12:13 Subject: sugar ui To: Frederick Grose fgr...@gmail.com, xordu...@gmail.com, volunt...@laptop.org dear olpcers, i am a recently retired computer scientist who would like to contribute design ideas to the project. my cv is herehttps://sites.google.com/site/djhbrown2/CV.doc . Ah, another generalist. Excellent. I will want to ask you about the Alhambra tiling semiotics at some point. Some of my Sufi friends have mentioned that sort of thing in connection with NeoPlatonism. I see an item in Algol68, but you do not mention what other languages you have worked in. Sugar mainly uses Python, Logo, and Smalltalk, and I am trying to get a version of APL added that has been used for math textbooks, starting with elementary-school arithmetic. having looked at the sugar interface, my first impression is that it needs a complete rework. i do not know what its users (kids) make of it though, nor can i find any data on user experiences. I and others have documented some of the known issues in the Wiki at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/The_Undiscoverable I know of no research specifically on the UI in classrooms. We do have some classroom research on other aspects of the project. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_research i'm disappointed not to find any openly-published separately-produced k12 stuff on xo; perhaps it is all platform-dependent? Yes, Sugar is a platform with very specific features, such as collaboration and the Journal. See Make Your Own Sugar Activities http://en.flossmanuals.net/make-your-own-sugar-activities/ Sugar Activities are openly published at http://activities.sugarlabs.org//en-US/sugar/ and some have made their way into various Linux distributions. sugar is based on fedora i believe, so would it run any app written for fedora? Yes. Recent XOs have enough room to run Gnome in addition to Sugar, so users can install any Fedora software that fits in storage and memory. aside from that, i would be interested to contribute to an english language learning project. Certainly. We can discuss getting such a project localized into as many as a hundred other languages. http://translate.sugarlabs.org/ there is a ton of stuff already out there which could
Re: [Sugar-devel] Fwd: sugar ui
is easy. | EnglishClass101.com http://www.englishclass101.com/videoINSEARCH English Resources http://elearning.insearch.edu.au/courses/GE01_Wk1.aspEnglish resources and lesson plans | Guardian Teacher Network | guardian.co.ukhttp://teachers.guardian.co.uk/subject/english.aspxLearn English Language | Students Circle Networkhttp://studentscircle.net/live/category/english/OCW Consortium - Advanced Course Searchhttp://www.ocwconsortium.org/index.php?option=com_coursefinderview=searchuss=1Itemid=9q=englishl=BBC - Podcasts - Learning http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/genre/learning david On 11 August 2012 00:52, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 10:18 PM, David Brown djhbr...@gmail.com wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: David Brown djhbr...@gmail.com Date: 10 August 2012 12:13 Subject: sugar ui To: Frederick Grose fgr...@gmail.com, xordu...@gmail.com, volunt...@laptop.org dear olpcers, i am a recently retired computer scientist who would like to contribute design ideas to the project. my cv is here. having looked at the sugar interface, my first impression is that it needs a complete rework. i do not know what its users (kids) make of it though, nor can i find any data on user experiences. There is little data in English, since most Sugar users are not native English speakers. But there are quite a few studies in Spanish (although less specific to the UI details and more focused on the overall impact.) You can find some materials here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Recursos_en_espanol#Evaluaci.C3.B3n_de_Proyectos i'm disappointed not to find any openly-published separately-produced k12 stuff on xo; perhaps it is all platform-dependent? Not sure what you are referring to. sugar is based on fedora i believe, so would it run any app written for fedora? Yes... but not all apps run equally as well, since Sugar restricts apps to single windows. (e.g., inkscape works well, the gimp not so well). aside from that, i would be interested to contribute to an english language learning project. there is a ton of stuff already out there which could be collected together, rather than reinvent the wheel. Lots of separate efforts in the area. C. Scott is leading one. I am working with .NI and .PY on another. Love to get more input/help. is there a software development management structure? who makes the release decisions? We have a devel team and release managers. is there an olpc executive operations management structure? why isnt olpc in bed with national school curriculum/materials organisations? or maybe it is - but if so, why aren't xos available to schools who can afford to buy them? It is a country by country decision. OLPC doesn't have the resources to operate unilaterally, nor should it. what is the target age range of xo users? 6-12. The new machines with touch could reach a younger audience. i like the notion of sugar network, but when i look at the screenshots on http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Network/Tutorial i find it hard to imagine what a child would do with it. a screen full of coloured x's does not convey any useful information other than the number of them... it reads as if it was made by unix enthusiasts for unix enthusiasts scott's blog mentions an effort last year to develop narrative interfaces - this sounds like a good idea, did anything come of it? i looked at the video by Angela Chang but couldn't find any contact info for her. i noticed the text she was displaying is not read out aloud at the time it is displayed, which i would have thought is vital for a language learning tool. she also seems to be of a mind that children would use it with their parents in attendance, but children need to be able to learn a foreign language without their parents' help. this raises a general point, surely xo needs to be an obvious interface?? (ie users should not need any outside help to use it. it should be ready to hand). Easier said than done. But your ideas for making things more obvious are welcome. But, FWIW, obvious and impact-on-learning are not always coincident. regards. -walter david website http://sites.google.com/site/djhbrown2/home +61(0)266537638 +61(0)488471949 On 10 August 2012 01:58, Frederick Grose fgr...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 12:51 AM, David Brown djhbr...@gmail.com wrote: thanks for your comprehensive reply, Fred. i have looked at the links you cited. i am surprised olpc is still using irc chat and mail lists - is there an operational reason for this? The hardware software developers at OLPC and Sugar Labs are most comfortable with IRC and mailing lists as they are part of their current cultural tradition (they feel part of the free/libre/open-source software tradition). Many are loath to using alternative
[Sugar-devel] Fwd: sugar ui
-- Forwarded message -- From: David Brown djhbr...@gmail.com Date: 10 August 2012 12:13 Subject: sugar ui To: Frederick Grose fgr...@gmail.com, xordu...@gmail.com, volunt...@laptop.org dear olpcers, i am a recently retired computer scientist who would like to contribute design ideas to the project. my cv is herehttps://sites.google.com/site/djhbrown2/CV.doc . having looked at the sugar interface, my first impression is that it needs a complete rework. i do not know what its users (kids) make of it though, nor can i find any data on user experiences. i'm disappointed not to find any openly-published separately-produced k12 stuff on xo; perhaps it is all platform-dependent? sugar is based on fedora i believe, so would it run any app written for fedora? aside from that, i would be interested to contribute to an english language learning project. there is a ton of stuff already out there which could be collected together, rather than reinvent the wheel. is there a software development management structure? who makes the release decisions? is there an olpc executive operations management structure? why isnt olpc in bed with national school curriculum/materials organisations? or maybe it is - but if so, why aren't xos available to schools who can afford to buy them? what is the target age range of xo users? i like the notion of sugar network, but when i look at the screenshots on http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Network/Tutorial i find it hard to imagine what a child would do with it. a screen full of coloured x's does not convey any useful information other than the number of them... it reads as if it was made by unix enthusiasts for unix enthusiasts scott's blog mentions an effort last year to develop narrative interfaces - this sounds like a good idea, did anything come of it? i looked at the video by Angela Chang but couldn't find any contact info for her. i noticed the text she was displaying is not read out aloud at the time it is displayed, which i would have thought is vital for a language learning tool. she also seems to be of a mind that children would use it with their parents in attendance, but children need to be able to learn a foreign language without their parents' help. this raises a general point, surely xo needs to be an obvious interface?? (ie users should not need any outside help to use it. it should be ready to hand). david website http://sites.google.com/site/djhbrown2/home +61(0)266537638 +61(0)488471949 On 10 August 2012 01:58, Frederick Grose fgr...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 12:51 AM, David Brown djhbr...@gmail.com wrote: thanks for your comprehensive reply, Fred. i have looked at the links you cited. i am surprised olpc is still using irc chat and mail lists - is there an operational reason for this? The hardware software developers at OLPC and Sugar Labs are most comfortable with IRC and mailing lists as they are part of their current cultural tradition (they feel part ofhttp://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC:What_we_mean_by_free_and_openthe free/libre/open-source software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_softwaretradition). Many are loath to using alternative, especially commercial software. The support staff and others at OLPC might be excepted from this characterization (in my estimation) as their work tools must align with standard business software. things like design require a lot of thought, and chat is not the best way to provoke thought, as exemplified by the inanity of academic department meetings!. chat is good for one-on-one socialising though. here is one basic principle i would advocate:the xo interface (which is intendedly predicated upon activity and communication) needs to be good enough (suitable) for xo developers to use it for their own group communication it's clearly not as it stands. you mention developers and i read somewhere about core developers. i imagine there is a team somewhere, probably in Miami, that drives the development. those are the people i would like to communicate with to start with, to jointly come up with a better basic design than the current one. then it could be implemented, bench tested and then beta tested on the user community. The basic Sugar design came from Pentagramhttp://new.pentagram.com/2006/12/new-work-one-laptop-per-child/ 's Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Takaaki Okada collaborating with Walter Bender and Eben Eliason at OLPC. Only Walter Bender is active with Sugar Labs or OLPC. C. Scott Ananian, Director of New Technologies at OLPC, has a bloghttp://cananian.livejournal.com/that tracks his thinking and work. Other current design work centers on touch input http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Design_Team/Sugar_Shell_Touch_Input and community collaboration http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Network. i thought about subscribing to http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/Sugar-devel
