[IAEP] [Grassroots-l] OLPC in Kindergarten

[Alan Kay]

Hi Folks,

Radia Perlman in the 70s when at student at MIT did extensive experiments with preliterate children and the LOGO turtle and built a number of interfaces for them. She also spent some time at Xerox PARC where we duplicated her interfaces and did many similar experiments with chldren 3 years on up.

Might be worth exploring what's already been done here to get ideas and takeoff points.

Cheers,

Alan




________________________________
From: "forster at ozonline.com.au" <forster at ozonline.com.au>
To: iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org
Sent: Saturday, June 13, 2009 7:08:26 PM
Subject: [IAEP]  [Grassroots-l] OLPC in Kindergarten

Edward wrote

"I am working on a version of Turtle Art
that will use icons rather than text labels on the tiles, and I want
to test how much of it the preliterate can grasp, and what we can
teach using that capability. We can demonstrate many topics in Turtle
Art, even if the children can't yet program such demos unaided."

Edward, to progress discussion, I have done a mock up graphic at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Tonyforster

I have only done some blocks. I have concentrated on turtle motion, pen and flow control.

I think the mathematics blocks are best left as is. 

Others, eg push and pop heap may be too difficult for pre-literate children to bother with. Likewise the portfolio and red box tabs. 

(Maybe keyboard input is important enough to bother with but the 2 step process it uses, one block to read kyb and another for its value, is conceptually difficult. First the interface should be simplified.)

Questions the exercise has raised for me:

To what extent could pre-literate children use Turtle Art?
Are graphics on blocks really better than text?
Does keeping text labels help develop literacy?
What graphics are best? 
Should the more difficult blocks be omitted or kept with text labels?
Should they be on different tabs if retained?
Where can we do user testing and get feedback?

Tony
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