[sugar] Interesting interface

[Alan Kay]

I think the bare minimum would be to have a page model (a la 
Hypercard, but with a more flexible approach to "documents"), dynamic 
objects as "turtles with costumes", where the costumes can be 
paintings, shapes, and other media objects, and have them be 
scriptable using an interface that minimizes or eliminates need to 
type, whose syntax is in child-friendly terms, but which has a decent 
mapping to incremental, vector and other mathematics. The "pages" 
should be usable directly on the Internet via a plugin, etc. (And, of 
course it should be localizable ...),

A minimal approach would certainly would not have to look just like 
Etoys nor be as comprehensive to be successful. Etoys in a sense is a 
"demo that wouldn't die", and got shipped around the world via the 
Internet to many different cultures, and thus gathered quite a bit of 
experience with many thousands of children in different language 
groups over the last 7 years. One of its several limitations is that 
the demo and UI were aimed at 8-12 year olds, and there is not a lot 
of design provision for younger or older children (both groups have 
special UI needs of their own).

For several years we have been designing what we think will be a 
better system with multiple UIs for different age groups (and one for 
professionals as well), and just recently received a fair amount of 
funding that will let us actually try out some of the new ideas. I 
think the main motto for OLPC should be "Children First!", and this 
means that such a scripting system should be part of the integration 
of all the objects and UI needs on the machine.

Putting it in as a separate stovepiped application would be missing 
the point. Much of the integration in the current OLPC design is 
being done in Python, and thus the children's system could and should 
be rendered as a special view/UI on the OLPC world (and there is a 
possibility of doing a more powerful, more media oriented base for 
Python than it now currently has ...).

Cheers,

Alan


At 03:42 PM 9/23/2006, Antoine van Gelder wrote:
>Alan Kay wrote:
> > Right now Etoys runs as an app on OLPC, but it would be better to have a
> > Python-based version of this kind of integration as the fundamental
> > basis for doing things on the little machine.
>
>
>Dear Dr Kay,
>
>I must apologize for posing a question which is so much easier to ask
>than answer, but:
>
>What would you consider to be the bare minimum implementation of a
>SqueakLike environment within the native environment of the OLPC that
>would have real utility in the classroom?
>
>Thank you!
>
>  - antoine
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/attachments/20060923/4e90c1f9/attachment.html