[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Yet more feedback from Boston! - Chat and Speak

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Caroline,

On 14 Aug 2009, at 01:28, Caroline Meeks wrote:

> Neither wind nor rain nor flaming emails will deter me from telling  
> you about what happened with kids and Sugar today in Boston! You  
> however are free to use your delete key at any time.

:-)

> Today, working with 6th grade students at the Museum of Science  
> Computer Clubhouse I learned not to start a Sugar intro session with  
> chat.  It was hard for us to believe but the kids spent 3 hours  
> really wanting to do nothing but use chat to talk to other kids in  
> the same room!!  We did get them to use other things but next time I  
> will end with Chat, not start with it :)
>
> We used both Chat and Speak.  Chat was more robust.
>
> I suggest that Speak be limited to about 4 participants. It seemed  
> die a lot and if someone typed a lot of garbdy gook it would try to  
> say it all and get behind.  What do other people think of this idea?  
> Should I ticket it?
>
> I started the lesson by creating a chat, sharing it and showing the  
> students how to join from their neighborhood. That worked fairly well.
>
> However, some of the students wanted to create a private chat.  It  
> could be done but it was very challenging workflow.  The problem is  
> if two kids decide they want to chat the natural thing for them to  
> do is both goto Home and click on Chat and share that with the  
> neighborhood.  This results in two chats and much confusion.  I  
> don't know how to solve this, as I'm not gifted at UI design, but  
> its clearly a problem.  Perhaps when you start chat you have a UI  
> inside of chat that lets you join other existing chats directly.


Yes you mentioned this once before. Here's a vague possibility that  
passed me by when you last mentioned it... What if any existing shared  
chat sessions appeared in the chat share palette (private,  
neighbourhood, <chat_1>, <chat_2>, <chat_N>). So Kid A and B both  
launch chat. Kid B gets to the share with neighbourhood button first.  
Kid A gets to the share palette but now sees a chat icon for Kid B.

This concept does get complicated for most other Activities, as any  
Activity that allows creation of some kind of document (Write,  
Labyrinth, Colors, Pippy) would also then need to perform a merge  
operation if Kid A and Kid B had created something in the Activity  
before the join happened. Though, this actually might be an ideal UI  
behaviour to drive a formal merge feature between separate documents.  
Kid A writes some stuff, Kid B writes some stuff, one then shares, the  
other joins, and (in a case with zero document overlap) you end up  
with a shared document with Kid B's text appended onto Kid A's text,  
all ready for some manual copy/pasting to create a final combined  
document.

Needs a lot more thought (devil in the details), but thought it worth  
mentioning.

Regards,
--Gary