[The Java Posse] Re: Computers for toddlers

[Dianne Marsh]

No worries from me, Peter.  See the other thread I started (Computers for Toddlers) to avoid confusion, but I didn't "feel hijacked".  Nor did I care. Dianne Peter Becker wrote: Sorry if anyone feels that I hijacked something, but it's certainly not the way I think about it. For me newsgroups, mailing lists and some forums (those that allow threading) can have conversations that fork into multiple topics and I believe that's a Good Thing (tm). If that happens I prefer to rename the branch in which it happened, which does not imply that the original topic should be stopped at all, it is just meant to provide a cleaner separation of the different branches. If that annoys people here I'll stop. Maybe it's too Usenet for Web 2.0 :-) Somehow people seem to be used to a flat world view nowadays, which I believe is sad but I'm willing to accept that. Peter On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 05:15 -0800, Jason Waring wrote: Peter, why did you change the subject of this discussion? Dianne has raised an important issue, and we should respect her right to not have it be hijacked! On Feb 20, 6:25 pm, Peter Becker <peter.becker...@gmail.com> wrote: [was Re: [The Java Posse] Re: An open letter to women Java Posse listeners (and their coworkers) ...] On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 23:09 +0000, Dominic Mitchell wrote: On 19 Feb 2009, at 11:09, Peter Becker wrote: I'd be very happy for my daughter to pick up some scientific or IT- type work, but so far I haven't been too successful. Maybe it is because she's not even 3 yet :-) But she got her first computer around her second birthday -- not a Barbie one but an old Pentium II with KDE on it, icons scaled up until they are really big and all mouse buttons mapped to button 1. She likes watching me use it, but she doesn't want to interact with it herself. Check out tuxpaint. My young daughter found that quite entertaining for 10 minutes or so (which is a pretty good stretch for her). Plus, the stencil library comes with back-back (or "ducks" to you and me). http://www.tuxpaint.org/ Comes integrated in GCompris, which is quite nice, too. And we've been using Childsplay -- she likes the memory game and the jigsaw puzzles. GCompris:http://gcompris.net/ Childsplay:http://www.schoolsplay.org/ One nice hack is to map .flv to a script running VLC in full-screen mode and close on finish. That allows dumping lots of Youtube videos onto the desktop with some Sesame Street, Wiggles or whatever else she currently likes. FLV playback pushes the poor old box to its limits, though -- it works, but not that well. Sorry, it's not Java, but it is good, free software To bring it back on topic: I sometimes wonder what I could do with JavaFX for this type of application. I'm imagining something that's constantly in fullscreen (Tuxpaint can be annoying with that since it doesn't even allow maximizing). Menu screens should be nothing but a big grid of buttons, some leading to games, some to media playback. And they should be easy to operate with the keyboard, e.g. by using letters of the alphabet, displayed in some big font on each of the buttons and to be used without modifier keys. But not on that machine. :-) Peter --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---