Hi, I did a little survey in the Planetarium pilot last week [1]. The subject was "Start new" vs "Restart" in the home view. Christian did provide a test case and I made a Soas version of Sugar that let's you change the behavior with a button in the Home View [2].
While of course there were interesting observations to make about starting activities one other user feedback caught my eye, too. There was a question in the survey: The naming alert. A little background: When I started the pilot, stopping the activity was a hard task for the learners. First you need to find the stop button, then you had to dismiss the naming alert. I use the wording "dismiss" because for new learners it does not make much sense, since they don't understand the concept of the Journal etc yet. What I did was, I removed the naming alert which improved temporarily somehow the situation. Since I wanted the kids to take notes I introduced an workflow introduced by the teacher. After each lesson (normally the kids work in one activity in a lesson), I let them take notes in the Journal entry. This works quite well and the kids like it a lot to do this. I tell them: "Describe in your words what you did today." You can write there as well if you did like it or not, or if it was hard task. And sometimes I give them a few words that should be contained. Like "coordinating system" when i did a lesson in Etoys on that. When doing the test the Naming Alert was present in the build. And the testers said: "Oh, that is nice, so I do not have to search for the Journal entry to take my notes." I asked them what does it look like and they said: "A bit like the Journal." What I concluded is: For the workflow it is important to have a way to directly take notes related to that activity you are doing at the moment. I still think, that it would be better to have that option in the activity toolbar, like discussed in the Design meetings. And I will strike for getting this into 0.90 :) But I think, if the kids use the Journal and take notes, the naming alert is not such a bad thing for 0.84. Thanks, Simon [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Deployments/Planetarium [2] http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~erikos/soas-design-test-DE.iso, http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~erikos/soas-design-test-EN.iso _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel