The Undiscoverable

Some ideas are not easy to discover; the concept of guided discovery, where a mentor helps point a learner in a fruitful direction, can accelerate the pace of learning. Some Sugar features are not easy to discover and while we are working to improve upon this, we provide some guides to discovery below.

No matter how well we do in making Sugar discoverable, there are necessarily some things that even a born lever-puller and button-clicker will not find easily, or will not understand fully. This page contains a list of such things, ranging from the almost but not quite obvious to the entirely opaque. We can consider whether some of these can be improved, but we know that there is a limit. So we have to alert teachers to these issues, and assist them to alert the children.

Nothing is 100% discoverable or 100% undiscoverable. There are many features of Sugar that can be discovered, without their use cases being in any way obvious. The question, then, is how to provide discovery projects where we know that a particular usage is appropriate, and include a hint on the feature in the lesson plan. In other cases, the children understand immediately what a function is for, as soon as they know it exists. In those cases, you generally don't have to show them twice.

Many things that would not be discovered by one individual before getting frustrated will be rapidly discovered by one child in the group and shared before any of the group get frustrated. Is this an an adequate standard of discoverability or should features be discoverable by a child in isolation? Where this is the case, we want teachers to know that, and plan accordingly.

Many of the Activities would benefit from a Help feature.

We should probably create a subpage for each of these issues, or point to an existing Wiki page that has the information.

Sugar UI

Collaboration
Hover menu unfolding: If you point at an icon and wait a second, its name appears; if you wait longer, a menu appears.
Right click on an icon to bring up a menu
Use of Keep button: Keep places a checkpoint of the current state of your application in the Journal. Users do not agree on why and when to use it.
Screen capture is an important use case for the Keep button. How do we store just the image, without the software state?
View source?: Not fully implemented
Copy and paste between activities? (No)
How to quit an activity: Click the stop icon on the Activities tab.
Change keyboard
Change UI language
Fonts: By default, only a few writing systems are covered.
Start an Activity without resuming last session: Select Start from right-click menu.
Community Jabber servers (Listings and how to change)

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Community_Jabber_Servers
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Community/A_list_of_Jabber_networks_around_the_world

Journal

Searches examine Title and Tag texts
Tags: Poor man's database
Resume session: Click on a Journal entry to start where you left off.
Install Activities
Copy to USB stick: Drag Journal entries to USB icon

Activities

xo-get

The xo-get script and Activity access a repository of Activities for installation and updates.

Terminal

The entire command line repertoire
Linux file system: /, ., .., cd, pwd, mkdir, rmdir, cat, touch, rm, mount, umount
Standard IO >, >>, <, |
Users and groups root, /home, su, sudo, /etc/sudoers, sudoedit, visudo
Permissions drwxrwxrwx ugoa
Regular expressions [0-9][a-zA-Z]?
File globbing *
copy-from-journal copy-to-journal Journal entries are in ~/.sugar/default/datastore. Each entry has metadata directory.
sugar-control-panel command : (aboutme/network/datetime/aboutcomputer/Frame/power/language) settings. use sugar-control-panel -l (small L) to list

Etoys

It's a programming language.
It's huge.
The tutorials are excellent as far as they go, but they stop short.
Projects? What are projects? How do I do that?
Code viewer
Program tiles
Make tile

Pippy

You can edit the programs
You can add your own programs
You can import libraries
Python is a large programming language. How do I learn it?

Turtle Art

Color space: The image below shows the colors that the Turtle draws for inputs in the range 0-399. The range repeats after 200. The 100-199 and 300-399 ranges are the reverse of the 0-99 and 200-299 ranges.

Shades: The image below shows all color and shade combinations in the ranges 0-99.

Programmable tiles (proposed tool tips will aid discoverability)
tamyblock.py (")
Portfolio tiles (")

Write

When unformatted text is selected the Style menu appears with only one item visible: None. Unless the user notices the little up arrowhead and moves the cursor up to reveal the rest of the menu, Styles remain a mystery.

Calculate

Graphing
Help

Measure

Frequency and amplitude settings

Library

I'm sorry, what is this for? Oh, wait, is this what the Journal was supposed to be? No, it only shows one entry for each activity. I can't list individual sessions or documents. So what is it for?

Browse

Bookmarks
You can use browse to browse the file system and .py files
Uploading from Journal

Jukebox

Where is the music?

Programming

We have activities for the Smalltalk, Python, and Logo languages. Etoys includes a different version of turtle graphics. We have to provide an appropriately graded curriculum on the basic concepts of programming, starting with simple actions, such as Turtle Art drawing commands. Then we have to deal with variables, subroutines, control flow, functions or methods, and so on up to object class definitions and libraries. The laptops also have FORTH and Perl installed, and we will want materials for those, starting no doubt in later grades.

We also need to bring in the Computer Science idea that the deep structure of a program is not the surface syntax, but is much more like the trees that we build in Turtle Art.

Subject matter

Whether in math, science, music, art, or any other subjects, there is much that cannot be discovered in unguided exploration, that has taken thousands of years of human history to achieve. The chief task in building new learning materials will be discovering ways to structure learning to maximize the amount of discovery the children can achieve, with the minimum of direction.

We also need to be clear about skills that need practice more than discovery, as in music and sports, or keyboarding or language. What is the proper balance? Os this point, see Musska Mosston, The Spectrum of Teaching Styles: From Command to Discovery. Longman, 1989. ISBN 0801303508 (out of print)

Hardware

Sugar runs on hardware and there are some hardware specific interactions that can be difficult to discover. For example, the function keys (F1–F4) map to the Sugar zoom levels. These mapping are evident on the OLPC XO-1 hardware, which has dedicated symbols on those keys, but not as easy to discover on generic keyboards. Similarly, there is a key dedicated to the Frame on the OLPC XO-1 keyboard. The Frame is accessed through a keyboard shortcut on a generic keyboard (Alt-F). Unfortunately, this shortcut does not work in SoaS in VirtualBox.

Listed below are some of the undiscoverable features specific to hardware.

OLPC XO-1

Opening: Readily discoverable by children, but not by all adults, some of whom have to be shown more than once. This puzzle aspect of the XO is actually beneficial in some ways.
Position of antennae
Rotate screen button: Easy to find, but what's it for?
Book reader mode, and page controls: You also need to know about screen rotation to make this work properly.
Keyboard switching key, replacing ×÷ on some keyboards.

Subpages