[Sugar-devel] Children want Sugar 0.84, for the wrong reason

[Frederick Grose]

See http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/535#comment:5, Expose Journal, Home,
Group, Neighborhood, & Frame Sources, where it's suggested that we extend
the 'Show Source' facility to more of Sugar.

Learners like to exercise and demonstrate their knowledge by customizing or
changing their environments. We can guide them to learn deeper concepts by
giving them ways to encode their customizations. (Providing a convenient
undo, save, and restore facility for their work would accelerate their
learning.)

The 'Modifying Sugar' chapter in our manual,
http://en.flossmanuals.net/Sugar/ModifyingSugar, provides a nice entry ramp
for this learning activity. We could provide a similar tutorial for other
Sugar features and then benefit from the creativity of all our learners.


On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org>
wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 13:35 +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>
> > So +1 to look customization. E.g., why not allow to change the
> > gray frame color? In Etoys you can at least change the toolbar
> > color (not permanently though, I should fix that). Even if it
> > enrages our latte-drinking black-wearing designer friends ;)
> > they're kids after all ...
>
> I feel that Sugar should aim to reach the same level of "hackability" of
> eToys: every UI element is an object that you could drag, drop, copy or
> modify.
>
> Of course, this has consequences in terms of stability and clarity.
> Before we could unleash this power we need to think of ways to recover
> from mistakes. If multiple undo is too hard, a "restore everything to
> defaults" might be good enough.
>
> Perhaps we're worrying too much. Re-installing the system from USB takes
> only 3 minutes and is already being done very often. A boy just showed
> up on the door of the repair lab, saying: "se borró el Navegador" (the
> Browse activity deleted itself :-)
>
> All we need to do is make the backup-update-restore procedure slightly
> more automated so that kids and teachers could do it without bothering
> the technicians.
>
> Actually, we don't even need to worry too much for a solid backup and
> restore procedure. I've always suspected that most kids wouldn't care
> about preserving their diary. Now it's confirmed: kids are flocking here
> to get the new version of Sugar even though their journals are not going
> to be preserved across the upgrade.
>
> On the other hand, teachers and teacher trainers always ask to preserve
> the content of their journal. Technicians use a pair of simple shell
> scripts to tar up the journal to a USB stick, so they don't depend on
> being within the range of the correct school server.
>
> I'll summarize all these things in a field report asap.
>
> --
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>
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