Re: [IAEP] Paint and Transparent Backgrounds
Tim McNamara writes: 2009/10/5 Caroline Meeks caroline at solutiongrove.com Could we set Paint to have a transparent background on images as a default rather then white? That would make it easier to layer different drawings and have them interact. Is that difficult programatically? Can people think of places where having a transparent background will be a problem? It's trivial programatically, but a problem for a kid's GUI. This adds all sorts of complexity. If you want that, use GIMP. Other things to NOT ask for: layers, channels, physical resolution, non-square pixels, zoom, painting bounded by selection, scrolling, user-defined canvas sizes, and maybe even cut-and-paste! On the other hand, you should expect stereo sound. :-) What format does Tux Paint save in? If it can save in PNG, then setting the alpha layer to #00 (or is it #ff - must check!) should be fairly straight forward. If we wanted this functionality by default, it may need cooperation from the upstream developers. For drawings, Tux Paint normally uses PNG without an alpha layer. The stamps (clip art) are normally PNG with alpha, meaning that you currently need something like the GIMP to create a stamp. There has been talk of changing things for the specific case of stamp creation. Tux Paint remembers the initial background image. This could allow the background image to be subtracted out, even with the anti-aliasing that Tux Paint uses for everything. The result would then be made available as a stamp. There are problems, some of which could perhaps be mostly solved by having more than one stamp creation button. Consider the case of a simple unfilled circle. Do you want the middle opaque? Now suppose the user draws a gray object on a white background. Is that to be opaque gray, or partially transparant black? ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Which Language?
Benjamin M. Schwartz writes: There are other options, such as HTML+Javascript, Squeak, and C/C++, but they each suffer from some combination of reduced functionality, problematic cross-platform guarantees, and increased difficulty of programming. Let's not ignore Python, which suffers plenty: 1. Python has no language standard. The best you can claim is that the language is defined by /usr/bin/python on some random system. There is a history of breaking compatibility with new releases. There exist several Python interpreters actually, which don't run the same code. Python version 3 will probably break your code. 2. Python is a joke regarding performance. You know how Java is often several times slower than C? Java beats Python by 20x or 30x. 3. Python being easy is **your** opinion. (and you're wrong) 4. Python has reduced functionality because it lacks inline assembly. That particular language feature is the door to everything. IMHO there is a limit to the value of universally usable, but if you want to push that goal you can. The most stable interfaces are the CPU instructions, the Linux system call interface, and the X11 protocol. Bring along any interpreter you need, and statically link all the binary executables. If you need Python 2, include a copy. Be sure it doesn't need any /lib/*.so files to run; you can check this by running ldd on the binary. FWIW, plain C is an excellent choice. It's the easiest language. Unless you tolerate FORTRAN or assembly, it's also the fastest. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] OOO4kids running
s.boutayeb at free.fr writes: OpenOffice for Kids (OOO4Kids) is available ... http://olpc-france.org/wiki/index.php?title=Image:Ooo4kids2.png On the subject of adapting software for kids... Good: eliminating or enlarging fiddly things that are hard to control with the mouse (ESPECIALLY WHEN KIDS MAY HAVE ONLY A TOUCHPAD) Bad: taking away the grown-up-tool feel (grey 3-D look), making kids suspect that they have something as worthless as a hollow toy hammer Good: being really careful to prefer beginner words and simple sentence structure in the UI ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] getsatisfaction.com
Re: [IAEP] getsatisfaction.com dfarn...@sugarlabs.org David Farning writes: I just wanted to thank everyone who is helping out at http://getsatisfaction.com/sugarlabs . Some URL there! All I can think of is this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjgeXTF0WNQ BTW, this works nicely, even on non-x86 debian: youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjgeXTF0WNQ mplayer -quiet TjgeXTF0WNQ.flv (scale it up if you wish and have the CPU power) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] New activity: Arithmetic.
First of all, it's wonderful to finally see this activity. Plenty of words in the UI are not easy, starting with difficulty. :-) There doesn't seem to be any scratch space to work in, but I'm just looking at the screen shot. Can the user lay out a long division in the standard form? Can the user have some place to write out extra numbers for borrow/carry (optionally tiny) and possibly cross out the original numbers? There are at least two styles for this, with tiny numbers probably the norm when doing multi-digit multiplication. The 3 difficulty levels are kind of vague. Just for addition I can think of... 0..9 plus 0..9 resulting in 0..9 0..9 plus 0..9 resulting in 0..18 0..9 plus 0..9 plus optional-one resulting in 0..19 multi-digit w/o carry multi-digit w/ carry, no change in number of digits arbitrary multi-digit That's w/o even considering decimals, negative numbers, fractions, and worse. Subtraction has an extra level, because borrowing is harder when you need to borrow from a zero. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Children's Library On OLPC project
Jim Simmons writes: A Journal entry consists of a file plus metadata. There is no real advantage in NOT storing the book in the Journal. You can convert whatever book format you're reading into a zipped archive of same on reading it for the first time then mark the Journal entry with Read's activity id. This would give the Journal entry Read's icon and make it resumable by Read. I do something like this with Read Etexts when it reads a plain text file. I'm not trying to save disk space in this case; I need to add a pickle file to the archive to store annotations, so I create a new Zip file and store the text and the pickle in it. This encapsulation makes it more difficult for people to share books with non-Sugar users. If a Sugar user provides a PDF to a Windows user, Adobe Acrobat should recognize it. Likewise for sharing with MacOS X and GNOME users. Putting a bit of non-critical metadata on a file is not a reason to be changing the file format. Normally an xattr would be used to store this data. (hopefully the Journal is xattr compatible) The XO does not have enough disk space to hold hundreds of books as PDFs. Plain text files would work, but kids like pictures and I don't blame them. As I see it, the child should choose what books go on his computer for himself, and delete books when he has lost interest in them. This all depends greatly on the PDF generation tool. Most are not focused on producing small files. Text should be stored as text. It should not have fancy kerning, because this causes bloat from constantly specifying coordinates. It should use a standard PDF font. The font should not be embedded. The PDF should be compressed. (not just the images) Images should be stored as JPEG with an appropriate compression level. Computer-generated line art should be in vector format. A recent PDF standard revision should be used. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Journal criticism
Tomeu Vizoso writes: On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 20:20, Lucian Branescu lucian.branescu at gmail.com wrote: I'm new to Sugar, so I may be horribly wrong. But to me, the Journal seems more of an annoyance than anything else. A lot of the work I see done is towards bringing back some of the properties that regular filesystems have What advantage does it have as opposed to a regular filesystem with support for versioning and metadata? A filesystem would be more compatible with existing software (which could just ignore the metadata), at least. I can very easily understand that for someone who is used to a regular filesystem, the journal may seem as an annoyance when an attempt to use it in the same way is done. The same can be said of any other diversion in Sugar from how Windows/OSX behave. Though, interestingly, many people have successfully switched from files-in-folders-in-folders email clients to GMail. Maybe it is because the journal is not as mature as gmail? There are big differences in the problem space. GMail is dealing with text. Text search is somewhat reliable. Sugar is dealing with all sorts of random data, like video. GMail can briefly throw **lots** of beefy hardware at the problem, allowing searches to be fast. Sugar can operate a single wimpy processor. Also, lack of folders in GMail is a common complaint. People put up with it because they like other things about GMail. I switched partly because Evolution was eating my inbox. If I think that something like the journal is worth having, it is: - because I can easily observe how non-technical users are unable to find the files that they stored in folders some time ago, or forget to save an important document, or modify a file that Firefox saved to /tmp and it got deleted after a reboot, etc, Now we have equality. The technical users are now also unable to find their files. :-( I think it's very important if we want to keep pushing Sugar that we distinguish between design decisions and bugs and unimplemented features. If we bring down good design ideas not by themselves but because of its implementation status, we risk ending up with nothing that brings new value compared to existing desktops. You say that like it would be a bad thing. The existing desktops are at least time-tested. Learning to deal with the common features of modern desktop systems is very valuable for children. And btw, the Sugar people aren't alone in this, as GNOME will ship with a very similar journal concept in their 3.0 version. You can find info in the net and read their own justifications for it. Would be awesome if the Sugar Journal and the GNOME one could share its backend. Could someone check out the current state of the GNOME one and compare with our needs? It looks like a heavy-duty version of Recent Documents. It's far from being a Journal clone as far as I can tell, but it certainly deals with the concerns that led to the creation of the Journal. Converting the Journal database is possible I think, allowing for an excellent migration path. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Journal criticism
Tomeu Vizoso writes: On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 04:54, forster at ozonline.com.au wrote: I am happy to expand this to the list. I have raised the journal once or twice before but mainly kept quiet not wanting to be trollish. ... The journal and sharing are probably the two central things that distinguish sugar as as a purpose built learning platform. The team have a huge investment of time and energy and are rightly proud of their achievement. That presents a problem for constructive discussion around the journal, the last thing I want to do is be trollish and destructive. You probably would look trollish and upset a few people, but this can be good for sugar and/or education. If few people ever dare to point out problems, we have useless groupthink. I certainly point out problems, but you can't rely on me alone. It's easy to dismiss one person as a grumpy old troll, but not so easy to dismiss a variety of unrelated people pointing out that something isn't right. The more fundamental/core/central the issue, the more this applies. For me, the workings behind the journal are hidden and there is a lack of tools to make it do different things when the default operation is not what you want. Also temporal and tagging is fine as a primary method of storage but hierarchical storage is not offered as an alternate method. Instead of trying to add hierarchical storage to the journal, consider inverting the issue. Modern desktop systems often have special ways to view particular directories. For example, Windows does something special with the directory you use for MP3 files. It also does something special for the font directory. Suppose that one directory got a special view called journal view. This could be a My Documents or Desktop directory. Activities throw stuff in there using the journal API. AFAIK, GNOME's Nautilus just needs a plug-in to enable a journal view to work there. The hiding of the file system was well intended, files and directories are probably just a passing phase in computing and they cause some confusion to beginners, but they are the system which underlies the Journal and the way we interface with the www I agree that it would be helpful to have hierarchical views of the file system in Sugar, though I don't think they should be the default Given that they are everywhere, it's an educational issue. This isn't like the particulars of Microsoft Office 2007. This is something pervasive throughout the world of computing. one because IMO a flat view like gmail with good filtering and search capabilities is more efficient for users that don't want to spend their energy in keeping their data in directories. I understand this opinion is very debatable, but it comes from my observation of how people around me use their computers and also from the feedback about Sugar from the field. The most interesting feedback from the field was about the kids teaching each other to wipe the journal with rm. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] journal criticism
James Zaki writes: Understanding hierarchical file structures use the concepts of containers and recursion with no limits (except for total capacity). It is not naturally intuitive, like a tree where branches get smaller from the trunk with fruit/leaves only at the end nodes. Empirically I've seen many new people approach computers (non-tech elder-relatives included), and hierarchical structures are not initially utilised. It was a secondary focus that had to be learnt out of necessity. Perhaps the concept is easier to learn as a child. If you've gone many decades without it (non-tech elder relatives) and gotten set in your ways, you may be at a disadvantage. Let's not leave the next generation at a disadvantage too. Perhaps an activity/game could be made that teaches the concepts of a hierarchical file structure. That won't get enough use. Learning to deal with the general features of modern computing is much of the reason why the XO even exists, yet the children are denied the opportunity to learn about directories. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Journal criticism
On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 5:49 AM, Jonas Smedegaard d...@jones.dk wrote: On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 04:58:17AM -0400, Albert Cahalan wrote: Tomeu Vizoso writes: I think it's very important if we want to keep pushing Sugar that we distinguish between design decisions and bugs and unimplemented features. If we bring down good design ideas not by themselves but because of its implementation status, we risk ending up with nothing that brings new value compared to existing desktops. You say that like it would be a bad thing. The existing desktops are at least time-tested. Learning to deal with the common features of modern desktop systems is very valuable for children. I flat out disagree that Sugar should be a learning experience towards using alternative user interfaces. In that mindset we should mimic Word, Excel and the Windows desktop, not for the quality of their interface designs, but simply because they are expremely popular so getting acquainted to them is very valuable for children. To the extent that there are common features that are highly unlikely to change across versions or even OSes, definitely. MacOS System 6, MacOS X, OS/2 Warp, and Windows Vista have certain basic features in common. It's a safe bet to say that most of these features will remain in the computers of 2017. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] F.Y.I.: this month's cover story for CACM is OLPC: Vision vs. Reality (cross posted)
Expensive journals are obsolete. http://pcic.merage.uci.edu/papers/2008/OneLaptop.pdf ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] versus, not
Kathy Pusztavari writes: Caroline Meeks writes: 3. Improved authoring tools and other automation tools might reduce the level of effort required to create this content. *Yes, this will be key. I really liked some of the ideas that Albert Cahalan put forth - even if I didn't fully understand them. I'd love to hear more of his ideas (hint, hint, prod, prod, wink, wink). Thanks. :-) I'd like to point out that I was really delighted to see your email mentioning Project Follow Through. Around here it often seems I'm the only person willing to accept that the independently reviewed evidence favors Direct Instruction. It's like some kind of idealistic reality denial is going on. Authoring tools are indeed a problem. Last summer I got together with somebody to convert some paper-based math worksheets I have. It's not so easy! I took a few photos, he proved that bitmap to vector conversion could work OK, and... nothing more happened. Getting things into a nice practical format is not trivial. So you have some art, but... unless you print it out for use as a normal paper worksheet with a human grader, it's just not usable. (these were sheets used to turn an 8-year-old who only did single digit addition and subtraction into a 9-year-old studying calculus) Making a nice sheet of math problems with pen and paper is easy. Getting that to be useful without paper is much harder. Is it going to take a week or more of custom software development to do what can be done in 10 minutes with pen and paper? It seems so. That's not even counting the stuff that is impossible to preserve. For example, unambiguous writing is very important for math. You can't expect to handle math in college if you have sS5 confusion, 1|I confusion, zZ2 confusion, etc. -- and that includes Greek letters. Students still need to master traditional graphing and sketching. Long division normally requires an ability to keep numbers aligned. Kids who don't practice these things are not getting prepared. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] versus, not
Maria Droujkova writes: I think it may be useful to distinguish tracks, and destinations to which they lead. The real deal destinations are to make mathematics: coin definitions and refine them, pose problems, form conjectures, construct example spaces, create models and so on. Activities with real deal destinations invite students to make mathematics; this is the part where I get pretty religious and I suspect Tim does, as well. I don't think this is a proper expectation. Gym class isn't expected to create pro or Olympic athletes. Music class isn't expected to create pop stars. Native language class isn't expected to create a J. K. Rowling, Shakespeare, or Tom Clancy. Math isn't any different. A student who is **solidly** prepared for calculus is doing well. This would include word problems with a minimum of 4 steps, some algebra, geometry, trigonometry, etc. Here in the USA, most students get nowhere near that level. For the very best students we may hope for completing calculus early enough to use it for physics, followed by statistics with calculus. Maybe one could throw in a tiny bit about game theory or aliasing. A desire to have students make mathematics can't be allowed to get in the way of ensuring that non-ideal students learn the existing math that they need. Math isn't just for people like Euler. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] educational brew
Costello, Rob R writes: most teachers that i know want to know that any 'innovation' 'addresses the curriculum' ... but this won't overturn the inertia in traditional curriculum content To a teacher, is curriculum the raw state/national standard or is it instead the content of the particular textbook that the school uses? In any case, you're up against a compatibility issue. Students will transfer, sometimes during the school year, and hopefully graduate. An oddball school does a disservice to the students. for example i can see no maths curriculum in the world (i've been looking at lots of them in detail recently) that is doing much more than including a few references to recursion or iteration... (there was more 'programming' in my year 12 course in 1985) Which other math would you eliminate to make room for this, and what will happen to the students if they transfer or graduate without knowing that other math? BTW, though I like computer science too, this stuff isn't that useful. i also fully agree with Kathy that personalisation can mean software intelligently adapts the sequence of lessons... i've seen that in action as well I've been thinking about this. It's really valuable, though not so easy to implement. Let's take 4th grade math as an example: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Math4Team/Resources/Curriculum_Chart Suppose you wrote up lessons for all those. You'd get a lot of overlap with the California standard, the Iowa standard, etc. The overlap becomes severe if you add the rest of the grades. Imagine having lessons to cover all standards. To benefit from a given lesson, one must master any prerequisites. This should remind you of building software with the make program or perhaps installing software from RPM packages. Leaving aside the minor issue of review, there is no point to presenting students with old lessons. Leaving aside the minor issue of testing out, there is no point to presenting students with lessons that they have not prepared for. You could set up 4th grade math for Massachusetts as a list of things to master. It's quite similar to setting up a Makefile with a target that exists purely to have a list of prerequisites. This target becomes a goal to reach. Once the goal is chosen, the software supplies lessons as required to reach it. When more than one lesson would be appropriate, allowing student choice could help to keep the student in a good mood for learning. Sadly, a real-world system would also need to provide distraction for the students who are at risk for completing the grade before the end of the year. Traditional schools don't tolerate that well. i know traditional curriculum can get suffocating and dry .. Of course, dealing with suffocating and dry stuff is a valuable life skill. :-/ Sitting down to slog through something boring is not easy for many people. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The User experience/interface for Printing
On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 1:47 AM, Andrés Ambrois andresambr...@gmail.com wrote: On Sunday 03 May 2009 06:29:26 pm Albert Cahalan wrote: Vamsi Krishna Davuluri writes: The priority is on sending the docs to cups-pdf for conversion and then talking to Moodle for teacher review. It is a good idea to have the code that sends docs for printing (to Moodle, a local printer, or one discovered by avahi) in a reusable module that a /usr/bin/lpr script can use. Sending the docs to cups-pdf for conversion and then talking to Moodle for teacher review can be done via /usr/bin/lpr, eliminating the trouble of having multiple data paths. Adding a print dialog to every activity (e.g. Adding some gtkprint support in sugar-toolkit) should be optional for GSoC. First we should concentrate on getting entries printed, and getting teacher review right. Then we can move code around for legacy support and nice print me buttons. If you start with what you disdain as legacy support, then you can trivially test getting entries printed from the command line. The same goes for getting teacher review right. You could even test with the TuxPaint activity, using real kids. the teacher checks his print page in moodle, views the file (either through fancy javascript or a download) and approves/disapproves for printing. Kennedy then logs into his moodle print page and checks if the job was success or not, and if he has a comment from his teacher. I can barely imagine that happening in a real classroom. Try this: The student brings his XO to the teacher's desk, with his work shown on the screen. The teacher looks at the work, then lets the student plug his XO into a printer which sits on the teacher's desk. Printing resources can be very expensive for most schools, so the system should include a way for students to submit jobs to a queue and for an administrator to preview and approve or denie them. Tux Paint can rate limit a student's printing. For example, a setting of 60 will be once per minute. Do not forget that this issue is more social than technical. In addition to any discipline, the teacher can simply turn off the printer. This is advisable in any case; many printers use excessive power in standby. I dont see a teacher having a printer on her desk. Most schools here in Uruguay (and I dare say in Perú) don't even have printers. If there is one, it will be where the server/administration is. And possibly locked in a cage (like we have the servers now). So that scenario is going to be priority one. That sounds like a printer that students aren't allowed to use. Such a school might not need printing support at all. Teachers are unlikely to learn a complicated (probably slow too) interface for approving printer use. I just don't see it happening with regular normal everyday human teachers. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The User experience/interface for Printing
Vamsi Krishna Davuluri writes: So, talking to Tomeu, we agreed that for Write and Read using the gtkprint would be best as both support it as a printing API. The focus on Write and Read is short sighted and may lead to inflexible solutions. Now, the current plan is: 1) We do journal printing only, albeit, the respective activity opens the file. Eh, OK. Provide a script called /usr/bin/lpr which runs ps2pdf or directly runs gs. This lets normal software, which is already designed to output standard Postscript to lpr, work just fine. After conversion, put the PDF into the journal. Better yet, just toss the file into the journal without conversion. BTW, this can also be implemented as a filter script that the normal lpr program invokes for the default printer. Now here a cross road is presented: 1) Do we use a print dialog inside each activity that can save it as pdf, print or export a pdf to moodle 2) Do we use separate buttons for each of these operations? What of the user experience? Separate buttons provides a distinction that will be important in some environments. Some places will want immediate printing. For now, the print button can be almost the same as the other, but with the output PDF marked for near-term deletion. Make PDF and Print now seem like fine names. The initial plan was to make Read the global printing station, how do you find this idea? Starting up Read just to print something is not nice. Read may even cause an out-of-memory condition. For sure, there is no need to very slowly render a big document that doesn't even need to be seen on the screen. the teacher checks his print page in moodle, views the file (either through fancy javascript or a download) and approves/disapproves for printing. Kennedy then logs into his moodle print page and checks if the job was success or not, and if he has a comment from his teacher. I can barely imagine that happening in a real classroom. Try this: The student brings his XO to the teacher's desk, with his work shown on the screen. The teacher looks at the work, then lets the student plug his XO into a printer which sits on the teacher's desk. Printing resources can be very expensive for most schools, so the system should include a way for students to submit jobs to a queue and for an administrator to preview and approve or denie them. Tux Paint can rate limit a student's printing. For example, a setting of 60 will be once per minute. Do not forget that this issue is more social than technical. In addition to any discipline, the teacher can simply turn off the printer. This is advisable in any case; many printers use excessive power in standby. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Books Books Books
Edward Cherlin writes: On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 7:39 PM, Caroline Meeks solutiongrove at gmail.com wrote: There are supposed to be a Bible and a Qur'an for the XO. I know where the texts are for a dozen other religions, if anybody is interested in providing them. Sugar is not restricted to mature audiences you know. It's for kids. Both of those books are loaded with sex and violence. I really can't think of any books that are more violent, and I can only think of one book that has worse sexual perversion. Both of them even glorify genocide, war, and torture. Both have in fact been used to justify and encourage genocide, war, and torture. Students will need more than the bare texts. At least a dictionary of Elizabethan English, and preferably some of the books that Shakespeare himself read, such as Aristotle's Poetics, Plutarch's Lives, and Holinshed's Chronicles. Sugar for adults studying Libral Arts at an Ivy League school? If you want harder reading material, try consumer contracts. :-( Those at least have extreme importance to people's lives. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Books Books Books
Costello, Rob R writes: So refreshing to have Albert trolling again - waiting for us to rise to the bait If you really believe I'm trolling, why did you give me a win? Unfortunately for me, I had other reasons to post that email. I'm annoyed at the double standards here. If it looks like I'm trolling, then that's just an indication of how far apart we are in our beliefs. (and possibly style differences w.r.t. making clear arguments in a limited medium) This form someone who proposed a doom version for the XO at one point I was in fact thinking about DOOM when I sent that email. The double standards really offend me; I don't actually mind the depicted violence in either DOOM or the books. (inspired real violence is another matter entirely) I'll assume that you believe that DOOM is inappropriate. Any **fair** assesment would say the books are far worse. For example, suppose I wrote my own book with similar content. You'd be horrified by my tale of murder, war, sexism, torture, genocide, sexual mutilation, slavery, revenge, rape, gambling, prostitution, and so on. If such books are OK though, then obviously the mere killing of non-humans is fine. Compare... Death depicted in DOOM: hundreds of non-humans die Death depicted in book: most of humanity purposely drowned, etc. Real death caused by DOOM: probably none Real death caused by book: millions and millions (ongoing) Plus, in case it's an education project: Anti-science message in DOOM: flawed physics model Anti-science message in book: where do I even begin... Constructing content for DOOM: encouraged Constructing content for book: often punished, sometimes with death I wish I could suggest alternate books, but sadly all the good ones are still protected by copyright. (The Ancestor's Tale for example) The things that bug me most: double standards, ongoing REAL death, and the anti-science (anti-education) message. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] 3D engine uses in a no-nonsense GUI (was: XO Gen 1.5)
Christoph Derndorfer writes: I honestly can't think of a use-case for including any sort of 3D acceleration into the basic Sugar and activities. There's about a million significantly more important things that people should be working on before even thinking about 3D (IMHO). One can use a 3D accelerator to greatly improve human factors in the GUI. Smooth transitions in the GUI are vital to reducing the user's sense of disorientation and confusion. This isn't just an issue for less-clueful users; you might not realize it but poor transitions are forcing needless mental effort that eats up a tiny bit of time here, a tiny bit of time there... and it all adds up. You may feel it in frustration even if you don't spot the cause. Without the 3D engine, animations are a painful compromise. They are slow, jerky, and CPU consuming. Imagine if the frame could slide into view with fast perfectly smooth motion and almost no CPU use. Think how much more usable Sugar would be. Imagine if view switching and activity switching looked like a rapid zoom out to showing a grid of all views and activities, then a rapid pan to the right grid spot, and finally a rapid zoom in to the newly selected view or activity. Better yet, make it all in one smooth motion so that the user feels as though they are jumping with a ballistic trajectory. The confusion goes away and the transition might even be attractive. You can't make this be acceptably fast or smooth without a 3D engine, even if you cheat by using static screenshot images for the activities. Imagine having every activity smoothly scaled to fit the screen. An activity opens a 320x720 window. It becomes a 400x900 window on the LCD, but the activity doesn't have to deal with that at all. Getting stuff to work well on the XO is suddenly much much easier. Users can spot objects on the screen faster if they have slightly organic shapes. Rather than having **perfectly** sharp corners on things, give them tiny anti-aliased curves. Use bump mapping and other shader features in **subtle** ways to enhance object edges. Make the edges look like they have been polished or sanded a tad, instead of being infinitely sharp and thus ill-defined to the eye. Today, pressing a GUI button normally causes the button face image to shift a bit. That's the best we could do before 3D engines. Imagine if the button face could pop from convex to concave, with perfect realism. The highlights, the density of the shadow, etc. The button metaphor would be more effectively represented to the user. BTW, stay away from the pointless stuff. It's now common to use 3D for random nonsense that hurts usability. Don't do that. Stick to the stuff that helps the eye follow things: smooth motion, softened shapes, realistic shading, quality scaling, etc. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] First competitor?
Christian Marc Schmidt writes: On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:58 AM, Caroline Meeks solutiongrove at gmail.comwrote: On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Christian Marc Schmidt christianmarc at gmail.com wrote: I think we'd need to know the specific points of contention. I can't imagine which design decisions might work less well on PCs. Sugar remains significantly easier to use than standard PC operating systems... Put Sugar in front of the average adult sitting alone, without any instruction, for 20 minutes. I doubt many of them would agree with you. Caroline, I agree this is a challenge. Of course I would argue that this is due to our familiarity with current desktop-based operating systems and the difficulty of breaking old habits. Sugar was designed from the ground up, and hence does require a bit of a learning curve for those of us who use other systems (but for new users should prove much easier to learn). So our marketing needs to continuously address that Sugar is not designed for adults, but for children! Never mind the adults. Think of the children! should prove much easier is a hope, not a fact. Children struggle HORRIBLY with Sugar, especially if they don't have a real mouse to use. They do like playing with it, sure, at least until the frustration sets in. I have never seen a child successfully use the journal. That's not surprising; it is a black hole for data as far as I can tell. I have never seen a child successfully use the hover palettes. They also totally kill user efficiency and are incompatible with the long-awaited touchscreen. I have never seen a child successfully use the frame. It's always there when you don't want it, and usually not there when you do. Regular computers have an interaction device that is essentially always there but leaving at least two sides of the screen free of trouble. (original MacOS menu, OS/2 Presentation Manager thing, Windows taskbar, fvwm GoodStuff, etc.) I guess the thing to learn is that getting rid of time-tested GUI design is unlikely to produce good results. Uh, now what? ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Adults and Sugar
Caryl Bigenho writes: One man sat in front of the XO for several minutes with a puzzled look on his face. Finally he asked, Where is your file manager? I explained that he needed to forget everything he knew about computers and just pretend he was a child again. He got up in disgust and left. He asked a simple question and you blew him off. Adults use communication to avoid wasting time. Had you tried to explain, you might have gotten better feedback. Of course, then you need to avoid being dismissive of the feedback. Meanwhile, nearby, a little boy, about 8-years-old was happily exploring Sugar. I'm sure he was, but exploring is not the same thing as being productive. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Userful Linux ThinNetworks to deploy 300, 000+ virtualized desktops in Brazil
John Watlington writes: On Feb 19, 2009, at 12:34 PM, Tony Anderson wrote: Really sad. Buying one desktop and creating 'five' seats is probably cheaper than 5 or 6 XOs. Is it really ? I don't even see a real cost benefit. $450 - one low end desktop computer $350 - (5) $70 monitors $ 50 - (5) keyboards/mice $250 - (5) seats of virtualization hardware (from the userful web site) $1100 for five students = $220 per student Nothing cheaper comes with: 1. a mouse that kids can actually operate 2. a keyboard that doesn't drop letters 3. a usable desktop environment 4. a network that is fast and reliable However, it restricts use to the school day. The ability for the child to take the laptop home is crucial. I agree, but... School people are low-risk types who are used to dealing with lots of damage and loss. They've seen the books come back torn and soaked or worse. What do you do when a kid loses his XO? Does he just miss out on an education, or does the school stick to XO-free lessons? How many replacements are you going to give him? Think, for example, of the impact of the laptop on the other members of the family. It's for the kids. Other users would cause wear, unavailability, and running out of storage. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Education on the XO
David Van Assche writes: Actually there are a whole bunch of examples I uploaded to schools.sugarlabs.org, the problem we have is of how to categorise them. ie... do we put them via subject, via class, via country, via language? I can't see anything there. It keeps demanding an account. I have absolutely no desire for yet another web site account, especially when Moodle will supposedly shove constructivist bullshit down my throat. Why can't I just browse? If there are any course content creators out there, I'd love to hear their ideas, and if they need help with creating courses on the schools.sugarlabs.org site, I believe I can help. Perhaps we can find some way to work together. In about 10 months I taught a kid about 10 years of normal honors math. Along the way I saved all the worksheets that I made for him. He's now beyond that, being well into my old college calculus textbook. At the start he was only doing single-digit addition and subtraction. Nope, it's not constructivist. It actually works. I was careful to mark the worksheets that were not my own work. I think that far less than 10% of the worksheets are thus not free to be used in some other project. The free worksheets could be used as the majority of practice problems for a set of free math books. It's currently on graph paper, 10 lines to the inch. I don't have a scanner for it, though maybe my 3016x2008 camera (should do 200 dpi) would be workable. (really slow though -- I have hundreds of pages) Conversion would involve dealing with plenty of line art. I'm not likely to have much time for any of this, but it sure seems wasteful to let the problems just gather dust. Perhaps success is more about the teaching method and continuous effort though, in which case the worksheets are less useful. BTW, when faced with teachers that are missing or useless, something closer to the Robinson Curriculum would be appropriate. Be sure to note how the subject ordering avoids premature and ineffective study. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] squeak/etoys accepted as free software...
Jecel Assumpcao Jr writes: Holger Levsen wrote: IIRC/IIUC this is one aspect why the ftpmasters didnt accept it in main. More generally said, (IIRC) it's because the impossibility to bootstrap etoys. Is the subject correct? I mean I know we are talking about a directory called non-free but is there anyone out there that after what has been said still doesn't accept etoys as Free Software? I'm not fully convinced. It is apparently free of horrible legal problems, but it's not in a reasonable form for modification. The freedom is not fully usable in any reasonable way. Even though the etoys developers don't do it and the stateful VM (or rather patches to it) is/are the prefered form of modification. Note that several Smalltalks can be built entirely from a set of text files: Self, GNU Smalltalk, Slate, Little Smalltalk and others. There is no technical difficulty. The solution should be obvious: pick any one of those Smalltalks, and port something to it. Use standard audio and image formats for the source-free multimedia blobs. Your choices: A. Port the code that generates the Squeak VM executable. Port any code needed to create a VM. Make VM creation part of the build process. BTW, this really should be set up to allow cross-compiling, but I admit that lots of craptastic software fails to meet this higher standard. B. Port just Etoys, eliminating the need for Squeak. This might be more a matter of adding multimedia stuff to a non-Squeak Smalltalk. But as you said, the people who can do it don't have any reason to do so. This leads us to the situation where there is a group of people who want to do something which they feel would be very important but they can't do it themselves and another group that could do it but are busy with other things. It is very easy for discussions to get heated under such circumstances. It's not merely a matter of not being people who can do it. It's more a problem of why should we do your work?. When you want to join a group, you need to follow the customs and not expect others to pick up your slack. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Coloring books on the XO?
C. Scott Ananian writes: On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Samuel Klein sj at laptop.org wrote: Coloring something certainly helps remember it. And changing the colors of shapes/objects in a drawing or scene or skin is one of the simple pleasures in life. A simple implementation of coloring would let you pick the colors of your own sugar skin and icon. I dreamed the other day about those pattern-coloring books that introduce you to unusual but beautiful tilings; when I was a kid we used to make copies of them or trace them on onionskin and color separately, later comparing the results for elegant patterns. Colors! might be a nice base for this activity. In general, we should think hard about how to best distribute 'example content', which you can open and remix on your XO. From a UI perspective, I've suggested previously that these be presented as 'friends' in the UI, who have files you can share. The Red Cross might be a friend who has some coloring books available you can open in Colors! (or your choice of Paint programs). Tux Paint has this functionality. I was thinking of ripping it out to save a bit of space. I guess it's more valuable than I thought? Press the button the create a new image. You'll see a set of images to start with. The ones at the top are solid color, but scroll down and you'll find the starter images. Starter images have both foreground and background. The foreground is always shown on top, and thus obviously needs an alpha channel. For a traditional coloring book page, the foreground is all black and has line art in the alpha channel. The background would be all white in that case. Full color is possible. You could have a forest, with some of the trees in the foreground. Erasing restores background. Starter image properties survive save/quit/restart/load. The full set of tools is available, including stuff like flipping and mirroring the image. The stamp and flood-fill tools are most useful, though cheating I suppose. (BTW, flood-fill is fast) We have: jigsaw puzzles grids chess board chicken airplane ocean reef rocket shipwreck diploma-style frame skyline farmer maps (US, Japan, each continent, world, canada) castle nagasaki ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sad
Microsoft probably deserves to win. :-( Problems can't get fixed unless you admit that they exist. This may require the loss of a few sacred cows. Responding to several people here... I fear it was not a joke to suggest that Sugar on MIPS would somehow be compelling. Let's not be totally out of touch with planet Earth. People rightly ask what an XO with Sugar can actually do, and the answer is not much. It's simply nuts to think Sugar is competitive with XP. Within the Sugar community, certain activities are adored. They hold privileged positions, generally being installed be default despite not being of a utility (shell, browser) nature. They even get to hide their bloat by being allowed to require RPMs that are of no use to anything else. They are terribly slow. They are terribly complicated. It's really offensive to insist that other people (children, the poor, dark-colored people, them foreigners...) be forced to use stuff which you yourself find to be inadequate for your own daily (exclusive) use. Performance issues start here: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=alllang=all Why should we rally around Sugar? Microsoft is getting a chance because of Sugar. When something doesn't work, and you just keep insisting, how is that going to get anywhere? A truly amazing opportunity (Linux-only laptops for kids) has been squandered. Tweaking GNOME for the small screen and unreliable pointer would be a workable plan to save Linux on the XO. Those of you without a Linux background might not know it, but the OS can actually be rather easy to use! It can even perform well and allow you to find your files. Right now we're looking at an awkward environment that eats most of the RAM to provide a level of attractiveness similar to that of GEM, GeOS, Apple GS/OS, Microsoft Windows 1.0, and Apple LisaOS. (more pixels, less polish) It comes down to this: do you want to be right about Sugar so badly that you would rather let XP win than support any alternate Linux GUI? If you're that stubborn, XP wins without a fight. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sad
On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 5:51 AM, Bert Freudenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Am 17.09.2008 um 10:19 schrieb Albert Cahalan: Within the Sugar community, certain activities are adored. They hold privileged positions, generally being installed be default despite not being of a utility (shell, browser) nature. They even get to hide their bloat by being allowed to require RPMs that are of no use to anything else. They are terribly slow. They are terribly complicated. Feel free to name names, and please state why providing those activities is bad for a learning device, and don't hesitate to suggest a (non-Sugar) Linux application as replacement. If you are thinking of the same activity I think you are, then this got activities -- plural At least two activities obviously qualify, but I hate to pick on them because other activities share many of the same issues. It's in fact rather typical for activities to frustrate. I actually have serious doubt about the learning value of some of these activities, even ignoring the problems with ease of use. In my previous email I probably strayed too far from my main point: as long as we remain oblivious to deficiencies and insist on staying the course, we're handing kids to Microsoft. It's damn hard to step back and see things as others do, especially after spending tons of effort on cool new ideas. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [Fwd: 0.84 goals]
victor rajewski writes: On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 3:05 PM, Albert Cahalan acahalan at gmail.com wrote: You're using it exclusively, right...? (no bash, no MacOS, etc.) If it's not good enough for you, then it's definitely not good enough to be forced on other people. That would be like expecting gnome/OSX/windows developers to use the GUI exclusively without using the command line. The GUI is for a particular set of users, power users and developers might need something else. A 10 year old student and a tertiary educated software developer will have different needs from a file system. I don't know about gnome developers, but as for OSX and windows, yes they definitely do work exclusively in the GUI. I've seen it with my own eyes for Windows. (creepy!) I have to assume that pre-OSX developers didn't use a command line, because there wasn't any command line at all. Windows developers don't even type filenames into a Makefile. They just use the GUI. Gmail and delicious (and no doubt others) use a tag-and-search system; they both work great for me, and if a similar functionality existed for my regular filesystem, I'd use it in a second. Gmail is tolerable (barely) because email is mostly searchable text and because Google throws a massive compute farm at the problem. On the XO, we have mostly non-text and no compute power to spare. Here is an example: pretend you are a kid who wants to learn about his computer by exploring the filesystem. You want to look in /dev, look in /etc, and so on. Using only Sugar, can you do it? No, just like you can't do this in OSX using just the GUI. That's what the terminal is there for. I can do that with GNOME, KDE, and Windows. While I think bash is wonderful, forcing people into it just to view files is no good. Clearly you are not a Journal user. You may have played with it, and you may have even written some code for it... but clearly you do not really use it. This is the tricky part - we are not the intended audience of the journal/sugar. The intended audience is school kids. We need to be looking at how they use it and if it suits them, not if it suits us. This bothers me greatly. I'll do my best to explain, but it isn't all that easy. Perhaps you've heard of the soft bigotry of low expectations. You're... looking down on the kids when you decide that they can't use the same thing as yourself. They get toys, not tools. I can agree that some of the more complex stuff should be out of the way by default. The journal is more than that though; it makes the more complex stuff simply unavailable. It also encourages a mental model that is not in line with reality. The result is a limit to how far a kid can advance. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Concise explanation of Constructionism from the Learning Team
Seth Woodworth writes: [Future of Learning Group] We are developing Constructionism as a theory of learning and education. Constructionism is based on two different senses of construction. It is grounded in the idea that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge, rather than having information poured into their heads. Moreover, constructionism asserts that people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts (such as computer programs, animations, or robots). I thought that this explination was concise and really interesting. I would love to explain this to people who want to desige activities, just to give them a little snapshot of the concept. Does anyone have a problem with this deffinition? Does anyone have an improvement? Yes. That definition sounds lovely, like a politician's speech. It's all feel-good stuff that matches up perfectly with how we **desire** education to work. Unfortunately, the cold hard facts don't support the ideas. In study after study, including the largest educational study ever done, the ideas have been proven to fail. Better: Constructionism is a failed educational theory which promoted the feel-good idea that people would reinvent human knowledge though personally meaningful exploration. Constructionism is commonly used to hide both teacher and student deficiency in a sea of confusion, allowing the avoidance of necessary learning. Through the use of vague open-ended projects without instruction, the brighter students are brought down to the level of the dimmest students. The resulting lack of education is hidden by avoiding reproducable tests. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
