<div class="gmail_quote">On 16 September 2010 03:53, Martin Langhoff <<a href="mailto:martin.langhoff@gmail.com">martin.langhoff@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> Agreed -- that's a terrible heuristic. And happy/sad face is a terrible "UI". The computer is not happy or sad; it's _working_. </blockquote></div> I recently learned that when an autistic child played a Gcompris game on Sugar and were "rewarded" with a smiling clown they freaked out and didn't want to get the answers right anymore. The parent picked up on the problem and tried other Gcompris games with flowers and the child was happy to be "rewarded" with flowers so now they only play the flower games. When I was in Samoa at their olpc deployment, I foudn the kids started lots of activities but no one had told them how to stop an activity. I tried to explain why the XOs were not responsive by saying that the computer was like a cup and each activity added water to the cup, and after 2 or 3 activities were running the cup was full so they had to stop activities before the cup was full and that would make room for new activities to start. Now I don't know if that was the best way of explaining it, as a cup doesn't really explain clearly the removal of load. Can we come up with a good load analogy? For some reason I have the image of the cart loaded so heavy that the horse is lifted off the ground. I don't think that is appropriate. Use of colours to indicate health can also be complicated as green for go and red for stop are quite Western colour interpretations. There is also the scenario in the opposite direction when you consider wifi strength of signal - when it is full that is a good thing, and empty is bad. Tabitha