[Sugar-devel] conversations about sugar ui design

[Aleksey Lim]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 01:56:39PM +1000, David Brown wrote:
> this note embraces several different emails from >Aleksey and <Walter>
> 
> <The Sugar learner engages in the cycle of
> activities by using the Sugar tools as individual building blocks,>
> 
> ah.... if the objective were to produce sugar-literacy, that would
> make sense, but if sugar were merely a tool to facilitate learning of
> things that are going to be of use to the kid in the outside world,
> then every effort should be made to make sugar itself as transparent
> as possible, rather like google chrome tries to get out of the way
> just as internet explorer tries to get in the way with thousands of
> toolbars

A couple of general thoughts.

My own background, when I started contributing to Sugar Labs, was that
I didn't see how Sugar Shell might be particular useful in educational
process (but I saw technical potency of having community of "doers"
targeted to learning platform, whatever it might be at the end).
At the same time, Sugar Shell has OLPC roots when OLPC needed, in my
mind, "desktop" environment for XO laptops. And, Sugar Shell is much
better, imho, option than regular desktops existed in the past and
present right now.

I mean, attempt to create entire desktop environment should not be
dominant effort on Sugar Labs level when there is no urgent need in
having desktop environment (different to "office" desktops) to install
on particular hardware. Obviously, high aged students, most likely,
will prefer not Sugar Shell as a regular desktop environment. Low aged
students, at least in my mind, don't exactly need desktop environment,
but rather some environment (maybe pretty isolated from the rest of
current desktop) that will be useful for them from teacher's pov.

In other words, it will be useful if software, created within the Sugar
Labs, will run on regular desktops to give more flexibility for people
in the field. For example, particular school/region might decide to
spread tablets on Android among students. The "lets port Sugar [as a
desktop environment] on Android" sounds scary for me. Much better if
there will be a way to launch some Sugar activities as a regular Android
apps and having a kind of shell (most likely created from scratch to
make it more Android) for cases when students [low aged] need
limited/restricted environment.

-- 
Aleksey