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 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.
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?
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?