[Sugar-devel] [FIELDBACK] Naming Alert

[Simon Schampijer]

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/~erikos/soas-design-test-EN.iso