[sugar] idea for a tutorial recording activity

[tridge at samba.org]

I'd like some feedback on an idea for a tutorial recording activity.

The idea is to allow the kids and teachers to use the laptop to create
their own tutorials on how to use the laptop, or how do do some neat
trick with it, program it, use an activity etc. The recording can be
in their own language, with explanations at their own level.

The idea came from a recent experience where I created some flash
movies showing how clustered Samba works, and the great positive
feedback I got from that (see
http://samba.org/~tridge/ctdb_movies/). We already had detailed
documents on how to setup clustered Samba and what it could do, but
the movies made a big difference anyway. People respond to
demonstrations more than documents.

The basic tool I'm thinking of using is pyvnc2swf:

 http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/pyvnc2swf.html

combined with x11vnc.

The activity would start with a dialog box like this:

   ===============================================
   To start recording your tutorial, click RECORD
            To end recording press Alt-7

                <RECORD>    <CANCEL>
   ===============================================

When RECORD is clicked the dialog would go away, and the laptop would
be fully usable as normal. All activity will be recorded, including
voice. 

At the end of the recording the user clicks Alt-7, and a dialog
appears where they get to name their recording. Then there needs to be
a way to view recordings they have made, and share them with others,
probably via posting to a web site.

It might also be nice to allow the user to enable/disable the camera
during the recordings with a hot-key. This would display the camera
view as a smallish box on the right hand side, which would then become
part of the recording. 

I don't know how much of this idea will be possible, as perhaps the
cpu and/or storage constraints will make it impractical. I also don't
know whether I'm capable of doing any of this as my python skills are
non-existant and I don't have much spare time, but if anyone would
like to jump in and help then I think it would be worth trying.

I think this activity would be particularly useful for teacher to
teacher communication. Some teachers will have great ideas on how to
get the most out of these laptops, and we need a way to get those
ideas communicated as widely as possible. This might provide a
reasonable way to do that.

I've put a trivial example of an OLPC 'calculator' tutorial that I
have created using x11vnc on my B2 at:

  http://samba.org/~tridge/OLPC/calculator.html

Some problems with it:

 - I should have scaled it better so it fits better when viewed on a OLPC
 - sound doesn't play back when I view this on my B2. I don't know why
   yet.
 - the movie is too large, mostly because the sound is too high
   quality I think.
 - the Web activity consumes huge gobs of memory when playing back
   this tiny movie. It brings my 128M laptop to a crawl.
 - gnash consumes too much cpu and memory, at least for a B2
 - the JS framing in the movie and the pause control is not very good

The above example was creating running x11vnc on the B2 and running
pyvnc2swf on my Debian laptop pointed at the B2 over a wireless
link. I haven't got the pyvnv2swf python code running on the B2 yet
(did I mention that my python skills are non-existant?)

Cheers, Tridge