Spreadsheets

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Michael,

> There are no plans for an official OLPC spreadsheet activity. At
> least, none that I have heard of (or could imagine). Largely because 6
> year olds shouldn't have access to it.

  Can you explain why they shouldn't?

  Spreadsheet is a good way to experiment numbers and (usually)
provides simple rules to manipulate them.  Thinking about patterns and
relationships, it can be a pretty good tool.

  A built-in graph feature would be a plus, but it is also good way to
make them "draw" a graph by usign each cells as pixels.  Making a
graph feature should give them better understanding what a graph is.

  (For the making graph part, many kind of graphs can be done in Etoys
(and TurtleArt) by using the pen feature.  Etoys has a "holder" object
that can hold a sequence of numbers as text, so you can do very
rudimentary spread sheet like thing by yourself...)

-- Yoshiki