Impressions on B1 Machine

[Mitch Bradley]

"Creating" something from scratch is a very advanced stage in ones 
education.

The first step on the road to being a creator is to make small 
modifications to something that is already there.

Even highly-experienced programmers do much more modifying than 
ground-up creation.

Which suggests to me that it would be better to have a compelling game 
that people like to play as-is, and make it easy to make simple mods 
without having to first learn a complex framework.

Ideally, it should be possible to expand from that into more and more 
complex mods, until you have eventually embraced the whole system.

Simon Schampijer wrote:
> Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
>>   Hello,
>>
>>   Since we (people at Viewpoints Research) got couples of B1 Machines,
>> we've been experimenting with them.  All in all, it is really nice to
>> have the machine!
>>
>>   First some comments and questions:
>>
>>   * Unfortunately, the touch pad is not working well.  To experiment
>>     various (software related) stuff on the machine, using an external
>>     mouse makes a lot of sense.
>>
>>   * The infrastructure mode of wireless works with my 802.11b wireless
>>     router.  However, we are having hard time to do it with our office
>>     network.  It is to do with the router is 802.11g, the wep key is
>>     different or some other reasons.
>>
>>   * Is there any way to set up ad hoc (mesh) network between units?  I
>>     think I saw a wiki entry that says it is not working perfectly,
>>     but would like to try it.
>>
>>   Now, a bit of my thought:
>>
>>   Speaking of experiments, I would like to encourage the developers to
>> use Etoys in various ways.  It is pretty much the only thing that you
>> can *make* something on the actual machine, currently.  For
>> application designers and developers, or content designers, it should
>> give some sense on what it is like to do stuff on it.  Its UI is
>> different from the standard OLPC idioms, but the available
>> functionality of Etoys and Squeak still let you do a lot of
>> prototyping.
>>
>>   For example, there is a paint tool in Etoys.  If you would like to
>> feel the painting experience on the machine, you can try it in Etoys.
>> It comes will the real-time collaboration, so you can experiment a
>> real-time collaborative painting, for example, with two B1 machines.
>> (Once Sugar gets its own painting tool, we would like to use it, or at
>> least modify the look of the Squeak's painting tool so that it
>> imitates the native painting tool.)
>>
>>   If you think that constructionist approach is a good idea, it would
>> be good to think that kids should *make* stuff by themselves to learn
>> stuff.  For example, I think that the things like Memory game are
>> something to be written by children.  Also, there was some discussion
>> on a clock application: waking up the machine is out of scope of
>> Etoys, but the other part, making a functioning clock, is something an
>> elementary school children can do in Etoys.  Instead of giving a
>> nicely done, professional looking clock from us, it would be great to
>> see kids-made versions.
>>   
>
>
> Hi,
>
> the memory game started as a proof of concept and a demo tool in the 
> first place since it involves sound, graphics and the networking. I 
> took the latter out for btest1 since there were some network issues 
> but I count on having it back in btest2. It was also meant to have a 
> demo for showing sharing/joining of activities.
>
> I agree that in the end we want to have the kids developing those apps 
> themselves but there should be different layers of interacting in my 
> opinion. Some kids are happy to just play the game, some may want to 
> use a "create your game" tool where modules are provided like 
> networking, sound etc and some want to start from scratch and do some 
> python coding.
>
> I think an environment to create a game would be nice. I have not had 
> a deep look but pygame might be too complex and not adopted to our 
> environment (please correct me if I am wrong). Maybe it would be good 
> to come up with a new environment adopted to our needs of 
> sharing/announcement and connecting to the sound facilities etc.
>
>   Simon
>
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