The Undiscoverable

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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.

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
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? This Activity, along with others needs a Help feature.

Turtle Art

Color space
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

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

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 (one kid in a group gets it, then they all do,needs more explanation here if it is to be listed undiscoverable)
Position of antennae
Rotate screen button (you press the button and it rotates, seems obvious, needs more explanation here if it is to be listed undiscoverable)
Book reader mode, and page controls