[sugar] Seeking opinions on the viability of an idea

[Mike Hunter]

Greetings programs,

I did a project in Graduate school four years ago that I think might be
interesting for OLPC to look at, and I'm writing in hopes of getting
some honest feedback from people about it.

My classmate and I wrote a program called "SymLogo" which implements a
subset of the logo language with only graphical symbols:

http://www.mste.uiuc.edu/courses/ci407su02/students/mthunter/project-final

I recently moved to Atlanta for my wife to take a new job, and I am
currently -- what's a polite way to say "unemployed...." -- weighing my
options of projects to work on.  On the long drive from California, I
read an article about OLPC which pushed me over the edge from "sounds
fun" to "I should work on this!"

It's definitely a graduate school project and not a production tool at
the moment, but my new-found "freedom" means that I could put some more
effort into it.

During my working career I've been subscribed to several FreeBSD mailing
lists, and it was there that I learned the following paradoxical course of
these sorts of discussions:

"Hey everybody, I have an idea, if I make it would you commit it?"
"Depends; show us the finished product and we'll talk"
"But I'm not going to do the work unless I know you'll use it"
...

But when you stay on the lists for long enough, you learn that this is
actually the correct approach, because there's really no other way.

Having said that, I'd appreciate any initial guidance the group has on
this.  Is this idea already covered by a different application (I've
been reading up on eToys; very cool stuff, but I think there's room for
this, especially for younger kids and for the no-need-to-localize
factor).

Thanks sincerely for your consideration and keep up the good work!

Mike Hunter