[IAEP] [Design] Multiple instances of same activity (Was: First steps with Sugar)

[Gary Martin]

Just wanted to raise one topic from Christoph's useful summary:

On 15 Jun 2010, at 15:36, Christoph Derndorfer <e0425826 at student.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:

> * how to stop Activities + not having too many Activities running at 
> once (since many first time users manage to bring their machines / XOs 
> to a halt by having multiple copies of Activities running, depending on 
> the hardware you're using this might be less of an issue however 
> especially young children can also get confused by multiple instances 
> of the same Activity)

Has anyone seen good real world cases where allowing multiple instances of the same activity to be run was useful or a vaguely common practice?

I'll raise my hand and admit I've never been happy with this Sugar design choice. It causes confusion, trigers low memory issues, and is the root of a number of complications to the Sugar user interface. Most other platforms have moved to tab (or similar single window design) based interfaces where the use case for multiple document instances is common with their user base (e.g. web browsing, media consuming, email).

I wanted to ask here as this is where the educators with experience tend to lurk, if the thread gets too technical we should move over to sugar-devel.

Regards,
--Gary