Talk:Design Team/Proposals

Proposal for "kidie" :- a kid-oriented intuitive interface to an educational environment

(to avoid repetition, unsigned contributions are either anonymous or by --David Brown 22:32, 21 August 2012 (EDT))

Rationale

sugar, conceived by http://new.pentagram.com/2006/12/new-work-one-laptop-per-child/ provides access to functionality via a myriad of cryptic icons. Once established in the mind of a user, icons are powerful: the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, for example, are powerful carriers of information. But to become a user of that alphabet, you first have to learn it.

"We definitely need the ‘tips and tricks’ section for the XO Guide." - http://blog.laptop.org/best-of-olpc-feedback-a-compilation-of-compelling-comments/

kidie's principal design requirement is that it be simpler, more obvious than sugar, and have the flattest possible learning curve whilst providing seamless access to all the functionality of sugar and sugar network and dextrose and toast and and and...!

kidie is a conceptual design; whether it will ever translate into an implementation will depend on you.

Clean Sheet, Square One, Back to Basics

on opening an xo:

i would like it to audibly say "Hello" in a language of my choice - i would like to be able to choose that language (from a list) (with the help of a literate friend if necessary). thereafter, kidie will write/speak in that language.

- please add your own idea here -

imagine you are a kid.... what would you like to do with a little magic box called an xo?:

- either, continue an activity from where you left off. the startpage would contain a journal button to pull up a list of all the activities in progress (as a scrollable circular list of thumbnails), plus activity category buttons to start new activities. herein, an "activity" is an app+documents created by the kid (or kidgroup) with that app; chats are activities too. - or, begin a new activity

new activity category doors:

- play a game - learn something - make something - meet friends - find new friends - see what other people are doing - roam around the virtual environment - add your suggestion here

doors would be semiotic thumbnails; pointing at a door triggers an audible one-word message (in language of choice) as to what is behind that door. sound-effect can be optionally turned off.

suppose you push open the door called meet. what would you like to see? how about an album of photos of all your xo friends who are currently also online/onlan? pushing your cursor onto one of them, a window on their current activity opens with a chat subwindow underneath. these days, we have high-res, high enough that my friends could be indicated to me by thumbnail-sized photos, so i could see over a dozen of them on my screen at the same time. and if my album were shown to me as an imaginary "rounded square" circular list (viewed edge-on), i could spin it and bring the other photos around the back to the front. it would help me if the photos were in alphabetic order of first name.

if a kid could see what other people in her neighbourhood are doing it would be interesting to her. eg suppose you want to make a toy sailing boat... unless you were the kind of person that insists on reinventing the wheel, you might like to look around to see who has done that or is doing it too. you would want to Searchfor <freetext statement of interest> - the search engine would match that against neighbourhood-wide activities and their cloud documents (if there were a cloud)

*comments and **responses

• These all seem worthy for further consideration and experimentation. The mass demand for touch and inertial interfaces is already producing easier computing. Perhaps there are some iPad or Android apps or app development environments that would allow more folks to mock up or create new, user inspired tools. (The XO 1.75 has an accelerometer and newer versions will have touch screens.)
• Many Sugar Activity instances already resume with the state automatically saved at the time of exit (depending on the developer's design--try Physics, for example).
• Children are frequently asked (or try for themselves) to do things that they don't understand. This seems a natural way of learning. --FGrose 03:11, 14 August 2012 (EDT)
  • Yes, children of all ages, myself included, try to do things that are new to us, and sometimes find ways of doing them, often ways that their designer never imagined. and we sometimes instead fall down or injure/defeat ourselves with tools when we use them in a way that the designer did not intend.

• doors and wheels seems retrogressive, hiding functionality to simplify user choices, and making them harder to discover.
  • doors don't conceal functionality, but instead provide obvious paths to categories of activities, instead of trying to show everything all at once on one small screen. i feel sure a design could be worked out that would work equally well with mouse and keyboard as well as touch screens and finger-sliding.