[Sugar-devel] [FIELDBACK] Naming Alert

[Gerald Ardito]

Simon,

I conducted the test we discussed with my 5th graders today. There were six
students involved in the focus group.

First of all, they concurred with your results. They loved the feature of
being able to either Start New or Resume right from the Home View. As did
your students, mine remarked that it was way easier than going to the
Journal. They also mentioned that more often than not they are continuing
past work, as opposed to starting something new, so they found this feature
very valuable.

The Naming alert (present in this build) was something they found in their
way. They are used to naming their work right from the activity, so this
seemed like an extra step to them. They are not used to making notes in the
Journal, so this feature didn't add much for them, although I certainly see
how it could be really useful.

I hope this is helpful.

Best,
Gerald


On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 3:05 AM, Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I did a little survey in the Planetarium pilot last week [1]. The
> subject was "Start new" vs "Restart" in the home view. Christian did
> provide a test case and I made a Soas version of Sugar that let's you
> change the behavior with a button in the Home View [2].
>
> While of course there were interesting observations to make about
> starting activities one other user feedback caught my eye, too. There
> was a question in the survey: The naming alert.
>
> A little background: When I started the pilot, stopping the activity was
> a hard task for the learners. First you need to find the stop button,
> then you had to dismiss the naming alert. I use the wording "dismiss"
> because for new learners it does not make much sense, since they don't
> understand the concept of the Journal etc yet. What I did was, I removed
> the naming alert which improved temporarily somehow the situation. Since
> I wanted the kids to take notes I introduced an workflow introduced by
> the teacher. After each lesson (normally the kids work in one activity
> in a lesson), I let them take notes in the Journal entry. This works
> quite well and the kids like it a lot to do this. I tell them: "Describe
> in your words what you did today." You can write there as well if you
> did like it or not, or if it was hard task. And sometimes I give them a
> few words that should be contained. Like "coordinating system" when i
> did a lesson in Etoys on that.
>
> When doing the test the Naming Alert was present in the build. And the
> testers said: "Oh, that is nice, so I do not have to search for the
> Journal entry to take my notes." I asked them what does it look like and
> they said: "A bit like the Journal."
>
> What I concluded is: For the workflow it is important to have a way to
> directly take notes related to that activity you are doing at the
> moment. I still think, that it would be better to have that option in
> the activity toolbar, like discussed in the Design meetings. And I will
> strike for getting this into 0.90 :) But I think, if the kids use the
> Journal and take notes, the naming alert is not such a bad thing for 0.84.
>
> Thanks,
>     Simon
>
> [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Deployments/Planetarium
> [2] http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~erikos/soas-design-test-DE.iso<http://shell.sugarlabs.org/%7Eerikos/soas-design-test-DE.iso>
> ,
> http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~erikos/soas-design-test-EN.iso<http://shell.sugarlabs.org/%7Eerikos/soas-design-test-EN.iso>
>
>
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