Carlos, > The only reason I offered a link to the game "Circle-the-Cat" was to offer an > example of an easy to use application. > What I meant by that is that you are already using it after a single clic on > the link I sent. > No downloading or installation is required. It works with any computer > connected to internet (or to a school server??), using any operating system.
There are three different factors which combine to create an overall user experience: 1) different levels of taking care of the details, which is the issue you are brought up a few times. Just to reinforce the example Alan gave, I once developed a tool for very technical users (an assembler for the Z80 processor) in a single afternoon and it was used successfully by several people in a company for two years. At that point it was decided that it might be interesting to sell this to others, and it took me nearly two months of "cleaning it up" before I felt it was ready for others to use (where these others were expected to be technical people like ourselves and not normal people). A good example is comparing Etoys with Scratch. Both are built on the same base technology and so share many of the same advantages and limitations. Yet Scratch is more of a one click operation in terms of sharing projects. The Etoys people are fully aware of this, but simply don't have the resources that MIT has to close the gap. 2) "no downloading or installation" depends greatly on what your computer already has in it. Your cat example didn't work on my iPhone, for example. Actually, the Javascript part did work but then it tried to download a Flash part. There is nothing natural about a computer environment, but we can take the particular one we use for granted. Microsoft used this to their advantage by pre loading Internet Explorer into Windows while Netscape had to be downloaded. Your particular example is downloaded into the user's computer and then runs entirely locally without any connection to the Internet. So it could just as easily come from a CD-ROM as from a web site. In your translation example, on the other hand, the one click experience comes from the fact that the application is installed on a remote server and your computer is a mere terminal. That is a good way to do thing, but Sugar and OLPC have the goal of being usable even without an Internet connection (though they are even more usable with it). An intermediate solution is to have one server per school while the students use terminals. There are actually several interesting educational projects based on this (you need at least one very technical user per school to keep the server running). http://www.slx.no/ 3) at any given point in time there is an "industry darling" which can do a lot of bad stuff and people will overlook it even though they would find the same thing unacceptable from any other competitor. In the microcomputer industry this was IBM in the 1980s, Microsoft in the 1990s and now is Apple. So I watched people give up on Linux after playing with it a few minutes because pressing the button on the CD-ROM drive didn't eject the disk, yet they stuck with Windows though they had to reformat their disk three times, one of which caused them to lose half of their data. I watched someone give up on OpenOffice because control-alt-S didn't do exactly what they were used to but they have since switched to the new MS Office with its drastically changed GUI and which is missing quite a few of the old options and commands. > My question is now: > ¿Do the children have the time to wait until Sugar is easily usable by > everyone, not geeks only? Problem 3 is not something that can be worked on, but justing giving Sugar to more children than people who use Windows or some other system will tend to change perceptions. People find whatever they are used to easy and intuitive. Problem 2 shouldn't happen on the OLPC for Sugar, but of course is a complication everywhere else (so you have Sugar On A Stick and other such efforts). Problem 1 takes a lot of resources, and is something SugarLabs seems to worry about. Given that the children already have OLPC machines with Sugar pre installed, I don't see the problem. Is it complicated to run new activities beyond those pre loaded in a given distribution? Is the problem that the teachers are using Windows machines? Do you feel that the people now working to improve Sugar should instead write Flash applications? -- Jecel _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
