The Undiscoverable
No matter how well we do in making Sugar and the XO discoverable, there are necessarily some things that even a born lever-puller and button-clicker will not find, or will not understand. This is a list of such issues. 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 and the XO that can be discovered, without their use cases being in any way obvious. The question, then, is how to recognize that a student is ready for a new usage of a known feature. In other cases, the children understand immediately what a function is for, as soon as they know it exists. In those cases, you don't have to show them more than once.
We should probably create a subpage for each of these issues, or point to an existing Wiki page that has the information.
XO
- Opening
- Position of antennae
- Rotate screen button
- Book reader mode, and page controls
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?