[IAEP] [sugar] Narrative.

[Gary C Martin]

On 10 Oct 2008, at 14:26, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 3:02 AM, Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 12:27 AM, Michael Stone  
>> <michael at laptop.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Bill,
>>>
>>> Here's a short dialogue between myself, Ben Schwartz, Martin  
>>> Dengler,
>>> and Bobby Powers on my interpretation of "narrative" as it might  
>>> apply
>>> to a user interface designed for "engaging children in the world of
>>> learning":
>>>   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Commentaries/Sugar_2
>
> Do we have any proposals of changes to Sugar so it better supports
> learning in light of the reflections on "narrative"?

One random thought that overlaps with some ideas on Activity help...

What if Activity and Content bundles were one and the same. You could  
have bundles that just hold an Activity to install, or just have  
Content for the library, or more interestingly have it hold both an  
Activity and library Content.

For a concrete example, I could see myself writing a handful of web  
pages as part help, and part guide, to viewing and understanding the  
Moon, it's phases, some traditions, stories etc. I do not want to  
bloat out the Moon Activity UI with help tabs, buttons, and pages of  
text and images formatted in some weird GTK encoding. The Activity  
should be clean and light and focused on it's function.

All the 'narrative' material should go into the library as html web  
content (pdf's can be nice but are resource intensive and have  
interaction issues of their own). It would be great if by installing  
Moon.xo, the bundle could also contain some library content.

Actually this is what the Mac OSX does. Applications contain what is  
pretty much some indexed html help files that the system auto adds to  
it's help engine when you install an Application. My MoonDock app uses  
this to provide a page or two of instruction about the Moon.

I guess I could provide something similar today by making two bundles,  
one of html library content, and one of the Activity bundle. Maybe  
there are benefits to this dual bundle arrangement (separate the  
Activity from documentation translation tasks; only install what you  
need to preserve nand space)?

--Gary