Features/About Me

Summary

Provide a mechanism for users to specify age and gender.

Owner

Name: Walter Bender
Email: <walter AT sl.o>

Current status

Targeted release: (1.02)
Last updated: (5 November 2013)
Percentage of completion: 100%

See [1] and [2]

Detailed Description

OLPC Australia uses gender and age as part of their program analysis. They also use age to modify the behavior of some activities, e.g., the robot in the Speak activity takes on the age of the user. The proposed feature is to modify the About Me CP section and the initial intro pages to include widgets for selecting gender and age.

Benefit to Sugar

This is a feature that is already used in one major deployment. It would enhance the ability of other deployments to leverage age and gender for their program analysis. Also, Sugar activity developers can begin to incorporate age and gender into their activities where appropriate.

Scope

Impacts sugar/extensions/cpsection/aboutme and jarabe/intro

How To Test

On newly flashed or build Sugar environments:

You should be prompted to select gender after entering name and selecting color
You should be prompted to select age after selecting gender
You should be able to go back and change these setting

Once you've entered age and gender, you should be able to change them in the control panel

Open the Sugar control panel
Select About Me
You should be able to change your age and gender
Close the control panel section
Reopen it and observe that the new age and gender are set

User Experience

The direct impact on the user is minimal: they have the option to set gender and age. Some activities use these data to enhance the user experience.

Dependencies

No new dependencies

Contingency Plan

None. The feature is complete pending code review.

Documentation

The gconf settings used by this feature are:

'/desktop/sugar/user/gender' ('male' or 'female')
'/desktop/sugar/user/birth_timestamp'
   birth_timestamp = time.time() - int(age * _SECONDS_PER_YEAR)

Release Notes

Comments and Discussion