[Sugar-devel] Remove the naming alert in 0.86

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Simon,

On 2 Sep 2009, at 16:35, Simon Schampijer wrote:

> On 09/02/2009 01:32 PM, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 3:36 AM, Simon  
>> Schampijer<simon at schampijer.de>wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> some of you may know, I am doing a Sugar Pilot here in Germany. I  
>>> try to
>>> keep my blog (listed on the sugarlabs planet as well) about my  
>>> findings
>>> up to date [1]. For technical findings (how to setup nfs, ldap on  
>>> Fedora
>>> for example) the plan is to use the wiki. 'Debatable things' I  
>>> will try
>>> to bring up on the mailing list as well.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>    Simon
>>>
>>> [1] http://erikos.sweettimez.de/   ---   Categories: Sugar,  
>>> Deployment
>>> and Teaching
>>> [2] http://planet.sugarlabs.org/
>>
>>
>> +1 on removing the “naming alert”, this has been bugging me since  
>> the day
>> it's been introduced.
>>
>> Adding “rewards” to the Journal is something that David Van Assche  
>> and Gary
>> C Martin discussed quite a bit Paris. Unfortunately nobody had the  
>> time to
>> really follow up on these discussions with some actual code... :-/
>> Looking forward to the next blog posts about your experiences in  
>> the school!
>>
>> Christoph
>
> Let me post here from my blog post why I think it is important:
>
> As much as I am a friend of highlighting the naming, tagging and
> description purposes, I don’t think the alert is a good way to  
> ‘enforce’
> this. I think those actions are not first class ones. I am happy when
> the kids understood the concept of the Journal a bit, but they will  
> not
> start to make better descriptions in the first Sugar days or weeks,  
> with
> or without the alert. For now, it is just a confusing dialog that pops
> up when you close an activity. And later, once the kids would know  
> about
> the importance they would be better served with other tools. For  
> example
> an option in the activity toolbar (like we have for the title  
> already).
> From my experience I highly recommend to remove the alert, +1 when for
> 0.86 already.

Personally I'm not keen on it either. I pretty well always skip past  
it myself and have learnt to click Stop and tap return. But, being  
neither qualified on the pedagogical needs, nor having seen actual  
learners of out target age, I didn't want to rush forward and +1  
Simon's proposal.

The main goal as I remember was to try and combat the slew of un-named  
Journal entries, but a good chunk of this was likely due to the Home  
favourite view always starting new activity instances. Now that it  
resumes by default, the Journal 'spam' has been cut down quite  
significantly (for me).

Perhaps we drop this dialogue and then seriously take another look at  
improving the names automatically generated for new activity entries?

Regards,
--Gary