Difference between revisions of "The Undiscoverable"

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* Rotate screen button
 
* Book reader mode, and page controls
 
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==Subpages==
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[[Category:Help]]

Revision as of 09:23, 12 July 2009

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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, or will not understand. This page contains a list of such things. 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.

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
  • Right click
  • Use of Keep button
  • View source?
  • Copy and paste between activities? (No)
  • How to quit an activity
  • Change keyboard
  • Change UI language
  • Fonts

Journal

  • Search
  • Tag
  • Resume session
  • Install Activities
  • Copy to USB stick

Activities

xo-get

  • Script
  • Activity

Terminal

  • The entire command line repertoire
  • Linux file system
  • Standard IO
  • Users and groups
  • Permissions
  • Regular expressions
  • File globbing

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
  • Programmable tiles
  • 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

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

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?

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).

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

OLPC XO-1

  • Opening
  • Position of antennae
  • Rotate screen button
  • Book reader mode, and page controls

Subpages

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