[olpc-nz] Testing summary - Auckland New Zealand, 26 June 2010

[Tim McNamara]

On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Tabitha Roder <tabitha at tabitha.net.nz>wrote:

> Testing summary - Auckland New Zealand, 26 June 2010
>
> Who:  Team OneBeep and their mentor, Tom, Tabitha, Fabiana, Leslie, Mark,
> Calvin, John, Nevyn, Abhishek
>
> Tested etoys 113 on build 180py
> None of the testers had any experience with etoys prior to this test so we
> started with the demo/tutorials. There was much confusion over how to get
> this working. We worked together to learn the activity and figured out how
> to draw, change colours. We figured out copy and move, resize and rotate.
> But got frustrated with when we stop the activity it forces a save, but no
> description or tags, or ability to give it a name. When we tried to open
> etoys again we were opening our messed up versions, and it took a while
> before we got it that we have to point at etoys in the activity ring and
> choose to open a new etoys, then we could start the tutorials again.
> We shared with neighbourhood and could join, but sharing did not allow
> users to see each others drawing. (We were connected via a network started
> by another XO).
> We could not get our heads around what it was doing in the journal. most of
> the time it didnt make a new journal entry when we stopped the activity.
> One XO-1.0 didnt have any journal entry at all, and the log was 0 bytes.
> We got some error messages. This one appeared during a tutorial - it said
> "an error has occurred; you should probably just hit abandon sorry". We took
> photos of the debug screen if someone wants it I can upload. We restarted
> the activity.
> I think this activity has a very steep learning curve.
>

There has been a fairly robust discussion about Etoys and Scratch on one of
the Sugar lists. Similar concerns, that it's quite difficult to get into. I
think the message is that Scratch is easy to get going with, but Etoys will
probably take you further. Etoys is a very powerful learning environment,
but it's quite specialised.  It does require a teacher with quite a bit of
knowledge to instruct.

I recommend Alan Kay's TED talk if you would like a demonstration of how
Etoys can be used really successfully if you take the time how to learn the
tool:
http://www.ted.com/talks/alan_kay_shares_a_powerful_idea_about_ideas.html


Had more questions this week about placing order for a couple of XOs here
> and there from different schools around the country. They really want to
> take a closer look at the XO so we really need to figure out how to get an
> order in and financed and how we handle import rules and consumer guarantees
> etc etc.
>
>
Consumer Guarantees Act doesn't apply for business purposes, e.g. schools.
They'll very very used to this.

GST is tax-deductable for business purposes. In order to practically take
advantage of this, NZ OLPC crews need to have a legal entity to surround
them.