[OLPC-AU] Testing summary - Auckland New Zealand, 5 February 2011

[Tabitha Roder]

Testing summary - Auckland New Zealand, 5 February 2011

Who: Alana (primary teacher), Anna (primary teacher), Ben, Charlotte (ten
year old), Fabiana, Mary-Lou, Robin, Tabitha, Tom

Learned that in some new games (Trails, Rectangles, PJ) you can press both
the mouse buttons at the same time and you get the screen resolution and fps
information. Press them again and the information goes away. (last week we
thought it was a bug, now we think it might be a feature)

The touchpad cursor jerky issues appear on all the new games we are trying
-  Trails, Rectangles, PJ, PJ lite. Don't have that issue on Memorize and
the other standard build activities. Maybe these new games are too memory
intensive?

---

Trails-4 on XO-1.0 running 439dx 0.88.1
Once I figured out that you can only go up numerically to the right or down,
the game was much easier to play ;-)
You get points for putting the matching the number on the ghost number.
Seemed to work okay and follow the same rules each play.

WikipediaEN on XO-1.0 running 439dx 0.88.1
Very slow to copy from USB to Journal - could there be a progress indicator
for these big files? This was loaded by two different testers who both
thought that the laptop had crashed. In one case it eventually launched
wikipedia, in the other case it seems that it did acutally crash as the
mouse stopping responding and the laptop had to be reset.
One of the tabs is in spanish - "search" says "buscar"
Links to high levels of poverty and illiteracy and malnutrition are green
(meaning they are not loaded) - page loaded from is India
Is there a place for a debate on what pages should be included for each
continent/country - maybe there are 500 pages that are hand picked and 24500
pages that are top hits.

Wikipedia (spanish)
Why does this activity not have ES in the name, to match EN?
Couldn't test it as didn't install correctly and we couldn't download it
again

PJ Lite
tested by ten year old, she thinks this is a good level of difficulty for
her and didn't want to try PJ with more pieces and upside down pieces. she
struggled with jerky cursor, even using a USB mouse. She did play this game
for a reasonable amount of time and do more than one puzzle so I think it
passes the ten year old test. One of the teachers also enjoyed playing this.


Castle
tested by ten year old who went into a couple of rooms and picked things up,
put one jewel in the chest, then she decided too hard for her. She tried the
game again later in the day but still only played for about a minute before
deciding it was too hard (she wanted someone to tell her how to play and
what to do)

Typing turtle
tested by ten year old, got bored very quickly and moved on, Alana (primary
teacher) said she remembered liking typing games when she was young so
possibly it was that the ten year old thought there were better games than
typing

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Testing 861 10.1.3-au2 0.84.31 on XO-1.5
There is a massive amount of activities installed but you only get a few in
the activity ring (and not the ones we expected) - is this deliberate?
Behind the activity ring is a spotty white not plain - is this deliberate?

What is this build called? Should it announce itself in the control panel as
au861-2 like the filename as well as 10.1.3-au2?

Tux Paint - not a Sugarised activity but still a good one! slow to load a
new page (in fact we ended up restarting laptop as kill failed), teachers in
the group were interested in this activity
Speak - works, robot doesn't understand many questions
Maze - works
Physics - first time user enjoyed making things crash into each other, it
would be good if you could set the density of an object
Deducto - sample page has "true bo" and "falsh bo" (labels don't fit
buttons) and pressing the buttons does not change the sample board

Musicpainter - ten year old painted some very busy music successfully with a
variety of colours (instruments) and played them back, then studied the
collected melodies and investigated each instrument in the colour palette
and discovered that left to right is time and up and down is pitch (though
not in those words!). She is figuring out quite a bit, a winning activity,
but when we quit the activity the a distorted sound loop kept playing (top
shows csoundxo using almost 80% of cpu), restarted the activity and it
seemed to be fixed (wonder if stop button doesn't work), sound quality is
really awful on Poppy Copy compared to the tamtam suite of activities run on
the same laptop. It sortof feels like a buffer underrun issue. On Shadow,
the sound is better, but many notes are glitchy with clicks and pops at the
beginning or end. It seems that csoundxo uses 95% of the cpu on Shadow every
second time you switch away from Music Painter. This seems to be quite
reproducible, persisting across system restarts. We didn't quite raise a
ticket for it as more testing is needed (at least, ssh in from another
laptop to see the cpu consumption while Music Painter is focused and try on
another laptop (since it seems to behave differently on different laptops)).
Tried to make a Sheppard Tone, but it didn't work, perhaps not enough
octaves are available? We will try this again next time. While making the
Sheppard Tone, got Music Painter into a strange state, changing the
instrument caused one of the progressions to change colour. I was unable to
work out how to change the instrument without affecting some of the
previously drawn music, nor undestand why it only effected one progression
and not the others. This persisted across restarts (which load the same
composition). Didn't try a new composition. Will try more next time.

Record - took photos, video playback was slow (kept stopping to load), audio
recording failed and did not give an output file

Story Builder - uses 100% of the cpu even when it is not visible. Raised
ticket #2578. Also found that Story Builder won't start after you have
started Music Painter. Raised ticket #2579

Numbers - ten year old can do the all the levels and seemed to enjoy it
(strangely the 1 times tables seemed to throw her in the beginning), didn't
appear to get harder as she changed the levels. The primary teachers that
visited us said the easy levels should have one method (like add or times)
and harder levels should have mixed methods (both add and times).

Tessellate - Works, nice simple game!

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Question for design team
On modern operating systems we have noticed that the search function
searches applications and files (everything), is there a reason for
separating activities and journal search functions in Sugar or should we
consider a more global search option?

Power Logs are attached.

Thanks testers
Tabitha
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