[Sugar-devel] Academic papers about Sugar (UI)

[Walter Bender]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 8:17 AM, Sascha Silbe
<sascha-ml-ui-sugar-devel at silbe.org> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Sorry for the slightly OT post, but I'm having a hard time finding relevant
> papers for my diploma thesis.
>
> I'm looking for papers
> a) describing the Sugar Learning Platform (high-level overview, ideas behind
> it) and
> b) that describe ideas used when designing Sugar (e.g. other experimental
> UIs), i.e. that formed the basis of the Sugar HIGs.
> c) anything else that had an influence on the UI design of Sugar.

I am not sure you will find anything that quite fits what you are
looking for. I can provide you with lots of background on the
pedagogical bases of our designs, but the core UI was not designed
based on utilizing recommendation form ACMCHI conferences and the like
(I can give you a long list of such guidelines if you want--everything
from the well-worn Fitts Law to metrics such as those recommend by
Nielsen. Those are useful, but they don't take into account one
critical aspect of our approach: user-centric design is not the same
as learning-centric design. See Eliot Soloway's work on the topic.).
Through roundtable discussions with though-leaders such as Alan Kay,
we identified our goals and our constraints, and then used an
iterative-design approach, doing lots of testing and soliciting lots
of feedback from kids and teachers. But there was never a formal
design document, e.g.,
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Human_Interface_Guidelines was largely
written after the fact.

-walter

>
> What I've found:
> - Carlos' thesis is the best match so far, but it focusses on what Sugar
> looks like, not the ideas behind it
> - some early articles about OLPC but they're more about laptops in education
> than about Sugar
>
>
> I'd appreciate any pointer in the right direction.
>
>
> CU Sascha
>
> --
> http://sascha.silbe.org/
> http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org