[Olpc-open] ENC: Development of applications for children

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Jan 9, 2008, at 20:44 , Manuel Strehl wrote:

> Hi again,
>
> thanks for the replies!
>
>> Have you been to www.vpri.org
>> It is the website from the View Points Research Institute, from  
>> Alan Kay.
>
> No, not yet, indeed. It looks good, thank you for the pointer!

More on Alan Kay's work with children can be found at

http://squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/essays.html

The Etoys activity on the XO is developed by VPRI:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Etoys

>> Have you checked out the Human Interface Guide page?
>
> Yes, I did. It was actually one of the links I mentioned.
>
> At our seminar we had lots of guidelines on how to develop for  
> older people (big font, high contrast, no fast movements, explain  
> GUI elements, ...) and methods on how to create software that is  
> useful for the elder (take a look at the UTOPIA project, <http:// 
> www.computing.dundee.ac.uk/projects/utopia/>). I'm missing  
> something similar for childrens' software in general and especially  
> (because that's OLPC's main target group) at the publications I  
> found related to OLPC.

OLPC's idea of a children's laptop can be traced directly back to the  
"Dynabook" as sketched in 1972:

http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/Kay72a.pdf

http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf

A dissertation on that topic was finished in 2004, a tiny bit too  
early for mentioning OLPC unfortunately, but a definite must-read:

http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/Dynabook/

- Bert -