Yama, I know a proud father (not affiliated with OLPC in any way, nor is his daughter) whose daughter likes telling stories. She's too young to write them down, so her father helps with that. He has enough of her stories that he's going to publish a collection on Create Space. I've read one of her stories. It wasn't bad. I doubt that the father could do as well without his daughter's assistance. I have two smart nieces. One went to the Illinois Math And Science Academy. The other went to Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia. In both schools there are no textbooks. The teachers are responsible for creating the materials the students study. I helped my niece with her Java homework, so I got to see the texts she was studying from. They were quite good, and they had a CC license so other schools could use them if they wanted to. I don't know how much effort the teachers put into making that happen. I imagine if they tried too hard they could get into trouble. Going from consumers of education (or even just textbooks) to producers is a big step. Children and teachers alike need some encouragement to make that step. They can't be punished for doing it wrong, or for doing it at all. I'm a big believer in constructionism because as a kid I was always trying to poke around and learn things on my own. I watched Mr. Wizard on TV and my mom bought me his book and I did experiments from the book on my own. I learned about amateur radio and I had a friend whose dad was a "Ham" who built his own equipment. The antenna in their back yard was almost bigger than their house. Their garage was full of radio parts. So you could say that we have only a handful of students writing code for Sugar and Activities, but they didn't develop in isolation. They're all in the same club. So maybe that's one possibility. You need an environment outside of normal school where a kid can learn stuff he wants to learn without getting punished for his failures, with adults available to offer guidance. James Simmons <div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Yama Ploskonka <<a href="mailto:yamaplos@gmail.com" target="_blank">yamaplos@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> James, impressive work! congrats! On 11/28/2012 04:19 PM, James Simmons wrote: <snip> <a href="http://www.flossmanuals.net/e-book-enlightenment/" target="_blank">http://www.flossmanuals.net/e-book-enlightenment/</a> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> eate books too. Just as we have students writing Sugar Activities and even contributing code to Sugar itself we will also soon have students writing and publishing textbooks and other materials. </blockquote> in a few words, what do you think is the key elements that are stopping kids from doing that? As you present them so well, it is not because of lack of tools and resources. I would assume there would be a ramp up, a few at first, then a deluge. So far apparently really not much... Something must be missing. After 5 years and couple million XO's in the wild, it's not happening (yet?), to the point that maybe it will never happen? BTW, you know that the kids contributing code, they can be counted with the fingers of one hand... Which makes them all the more important, but, again, why not more? why not teachers, hundreds of them? Maybe it's something to do with construct***sm? Evolution? _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) <a href="mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org" target="_blank">IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep</a> </blockquote></div>