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OLPC's UI To Be Kid-Tested In February
dfoulger writes "The AP is reporting that kid testing of Negroponte's '$100 Laptop' starts in February. This article is some of the first mainstream coverage of just how different the user interface of the XO Computer is — it ditches the traditional office metaphors in favor of a 'neighborhood' and an activity-based journaling approach. Video of Sugar, as the UI is called, has been out on the net for a while, and Popular Science recently gave the color / monochrome display a 'Grand Award' in its 2006 technology roundup. What do you think of this new UI?"
I've just watched the video and it looks fairly good.
Why is there no URL bar? It explains there isn't one but why not? Seems a bit of a problem for visiting specific sites as you'd have to use Google for everything it seems.
Monkeyboi
``Maybe I'm just a fundamentalist, but children first need to learn basic skills like reading and writing.''
And then, after that? Wouldn't it be nice if they could use their reading and writing skills to enter the global information highway? Get access to the wealth of information on the web? Share their own stories and content?
There seems to be a misconception that countries in which computers aren't widespread also don't have high literacy. This is not true. Libya, one of the countries that signed up for OLPC has very high literacy; in fact, many Libyans have higher education. From what I'm told, Russia is another country with near-universal literacy, but without universal access to computers. I bet there are others.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I understand why they did it but as a rule I hate icon based systems. I have a CG software I was trying to use that went that route. In that case they went too small with the icons to cram more in so they look like colored blobs. Instead of glancing at text I find I waste most of my time holding the cursor over icon after icon waiting for the roll over text to tell me what the function is. I was also surprised they were boasting of no text bar on the browser. Leaves you at the mercy of the search engine. In may be better for kids starting out the way they laid it out but how does it give them an education in computers when it doesn't teach them how any other computer on the planet works? They'd be better off with a ten year old Windows machine or far better off with a current Linux system. Nice idea but it seems completely pointless.
What does the laptop have to do with the Montessori method? If the Montessori method is inferior, why has a 2006 study proven that Montessori students averagely perform better?
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
I think Microsoft Bob might have been a better choice for the UI.
First off, I'm a big supporter of the OLPC project. I think it's a fantastic idea that will do alot of good.
... accessible to students if they have the desire/skill to use it?). Hopefully that simple UI can be switched to a 'real' UI and this will be done for all but the youngest students.
The UI they have created (see video) seems like a strange choice, however. It is a very simple and seemingly restrictive interface. It appears childish and maybe even somewhat insulting to the user. I thought that the OLPC was supposed to specifically encourage children to (1) truly learn how to use computers (not merely use them as applicances), and (2) encourage them to tinker/modify the system.
With regard to (1) it should be clear that providing a contrived UI specifically tailored to 'kid tasks' may be useful for the first week, but ultimately is a disservice to the children, as they are not learning about the true power and beauty of computers. They are not learning about modern computer capabilities or conventions if they are stuck in a primitive UI.
With regard to (2), my understanding was that Linux was chosen as the OS specifically because it allows for the students to modify, tinker, extent, and customize. The idea was that (unlike with a proprietary OS), they would be able to learn about the inner functions of computers and become truly interested and skilled with computer work. A simplistic UI that hides the true behind-the-scenes working of the computer hardly accomplishes this goal.
I may be mistaken about the UI. Perhaps what we see in the demonstration is an introductory UI that will be used by very young students (with a more normal GUI and system behind the scenes?
Kids are very smart... and I believe they would have little trouble dealing with a modern, full-featured UI and OS. So why the simplistic interface?
I was unaware that the current US educational system had anything to do with Montessori methods to begin with.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Sadly, the three Rs are not enough to create a strong workforce. Computers are the most flexible and therefore most important tool we have and therefore it is important to learn. It also gives incredible access to a huge library of information and powerful communication tools. I'd say learning to read, do basic math, and use a computer should be the basics of education. As for writing I guess it's a cute historical footnote but not overly important. I'd teach basic block letters and of course grammar and spelling but wouldn't waste time on learning cursive.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
They need to test with adults. There's a reason there's a cliche of "my kid fixed the VCR, computer, etc."--because kids' brains are sponges for new stimuli. They're still forming their how-the-world-works schemas and can easily adapt to new things. Adults, even ones who haven't used computers, are going to have more fixed ways of going about things, less willing to learn new concepts, less patient, less curious (just as a general rule.. I've known some older people who are insatiable learners).
but only 1/3rd of the population has internet access
I find it truly amazing that nobody on the development team realized the obvious icon collision with their primary symbol... the "child" splat and this much older, and more universal symbol.
As for multiplication tables, I think it would be easier to learn them if the computer could perform testing (i.e. repeatedly ask multiplication questions and get the child to enter the results. Gradually reduce the amount of time allowed to answer. At first, provide a graphical representation of an N by M square of blobs to re-inforce the association between the numbers and shapes). I found learning French and German vocabulary much easier when I wrote a program to test myself. I entered the English/foreign word pairs, and it would repeatedly ask me one and expect me to provide the other within 5-10 seconds before going on to the next one. Running this for about 20 minutes, followed by a break for 40 minutes and then another 5 minutes locked a set of words in my long-term memory far more efficiently than any other method I've yet encountered.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Maybe I'm just a fundamentalist, but children first need to learn basic skills like reading and writing.
And why does parent post think this excludes learning with a computer?
My daughter enjoyed programs I wrote in Applesoft on an Apple ][ that helped her learn her alphabet and basic counting when she was 3 and 4 years old. She was reading before she entered first grade.
Certainly the most critical part of it was her mother schooling her. But she also has vivid and pleasant memories of playing with that old Apple. The computer was of definite value to her as part of a broad learning experience.
There can be no question that the OLPC computers will be an incredibly valuable adjunct in teaching kids the basic skills of literacy, and of how to learn.
Actually, many countries claim to have 90 plus percent literacy, even those that supply as little as one year of education. When literacy figures are yes/no, the claims tend to be that they are quite high.
The extent of literacy is more important.
There, access to reading materials is important. For many countries, a town full of $200 laptops would be cheaper than building and maintaining a library with any significant amount of reading material.
That's were the 3R people are missing the point. A low cost computer is cheaper than paper, pencil, and books over even a short period of time.
But isn't this "fundamentalist" stuff off topic? I'm pleased to see that most subsequent threads focus on the UI.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
I downloaded the QEMU image and converted it to VMWare and ran two copies, which I named Tom and Dick. There are some neat ideas. Tom opens the web browser and goes to slashdot.org. Tom shares the web browser. Dick looks at the neighborhood view and sees Tom with a shared web browser. Dick clicks on Tom's web browser. It opens up to . . . google. What happened to slashdot? Tom is still looking at slashdot. Tom closes the browser. Dick is still looking at google. Tom looks at the neighborhood view and sees Dick looking at his web browser still, so he clicks on it and gets slashdot. Dick can't close it. Tom can close it, but Dick is still looking at it. Ok, switch to console, killall -HUP sugar-shell. Now it behaves like it should. It is really pretty neat when it works.
I guess this is pretty typical of how computers work. Throw 'em in the water, they'll learn to swim. Hopefully somebody was taught how to use ps, grep, and kill.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Cool, it has Etoys. :-) Etoys is amazing; a great way to get started with writing software, especially games. And it's a nice stepping stone to Smalltalk, which is a very nice programming language.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Correlation does not equal causation.
I just received one of the OLPC beta test laptops, and I've played around with it and started porting some X11 software to run on it.
The hardware is very nicely designed, and has a cool, unique look and feel, although it's in the very early stages and still has some rough edges and unfinished pieces.
The touch pad doesn't currently work very well, due to a combination of hardware and software problems: the cursor jumps around and stalls, and the left and right sides (for writing with a stylus) are not currently active. But a USB mouse works just fine. The keyboard is hard for me to use because it's so tiny, but it's good for kids because it's simple and spill proof, and only requires a light touch.
The screen turns around and folds over so you can use it in "book mode" without the keyboard or touch pad. The game controller buttons (and camera and microphone) on the screen are usable when it's in book mode. The round four-direction joystick pad and the triangle/square/circle/x game pad seem to send the same arrow key escape codes, and don't auto-repeat, but I think that's a matter of software that will be addressed in the future.
The camera is on the right edge of the screen, and doesn't turn inwards, so your face appears at the edge of the screen instead of being centered. It would be nice for the camera to be centered at the top edge of the screen, but currently there is no any room for that, and it would require a redesign of the case. The directional pad sticks down sometimes when you rock it to the left, but I trust that and other problems will be shaken out in future versions of the hardware.
There is an SD card reader hidden on the bottom on the screen, but no disk drives showed up when I typed "df" after I inserted an SD card, and the spring loaded ejector didn't work so I had to pull it out with my fingernails. Again, I expect this kind of software and hardware stuff to be fixed in later versions -- that's why they're doing this beta test: to shake out problems like that.
The antennas are very cute, and give it an anthropomorphic look like a puppy dog's ears, that I think kids will dig. (Somebody's got to port XEyes, XNose and XMouth to OLCP so it has a face, to complete the look!) It took me a minute or so to figure out that they also function as latches to allow the screen to be opened. I was excited to open the screen the first time I saw it, but I was careful because didn't want to hurt it -- however, kids might break something by trying to pry the screen open before they figure out you have to rotate both antennas to unlatch the screen. I'm afraid that they might get broken off easily, and they're kind of clumsy when then laptop is in "book mode", if you don't tuck them in by opening the screen a bit so they will rotate around to their closed position. They don't latch the screen closed over the keyboard in book mode. When in laptop mode, the screen does not fold back as far as would be convenient. If you want to use a USB mouse or other USB device, external microphone or headphones, you must open up one or both of the antennae, which makes it more possible that they might get broken off.
The screen is amazing. It's quite small, but extremely high resolution (200 dots per inch). The application I'm porting was designed for a large workstation screen, and it comes up with the text and graphics looking very tiny, but quite sharp. By default the display runs in 16 bit mode, at a resolution of 1200 x 900 (201x201 dots per inch resolution according to xdpyinfo). The supported depths are 16, 1, 4, 8, 15, 24 and 32.
There are buttons on the keyboard that switch the display between color and monochrome mode, and control the brightness. The monochrome mode is handled by hardware -- the X server still thinks it's in 16 bit color mode, and the colors are translated to gray scales. However some of the monochrome gray levels show up as weird colors or diagonal cross hatching, unless the brightness is turned all the way down.
Anywhere it
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Maybe you're too young to remember a world before Microsoft Windows (TM), but at my advanced age I can recall many people meeting Windows for the first time as an adult (actually, using a computer for the first time as an adult, as I did) and getting by in a few days. Typing is the main "computer skill" in general use that takes time to learn and that is platform independent. Clciking on an icon isn't as intuitive as you may think, but it doesn't take long to learn; and the OLPC does use a desktop and icons.
Do you imagine that using this interface will warp their minds and make them forever incapable of clicking on a start button? Is giving a child a bicycle going to prevent them from learning to drive? Does playing football prevent you from learning basketball?
Personally, I don't find it easy to use at all. When it first boots up, you get a screen with a little symbol in the front. Clicking it does nothing. Eventually, if you happen to leave your cursor on the side of the screen, a little thing will pop up. You then have a few strange, ambiguous, unlabeled icons. Only one of them really indicates what it does (the chat one), and it probably wouldn't to people who had never seen a computer.
Even if you figure out what those buttons do, the interface is very tedious. The only way to switch "activities" is to move your cursor to the side, wait, click a little, unlabeled button, and click another unlabeled, ambiguous button. In other systems you just click the (I'll admit, likely unlabeled) button on the taskbar/dock. It might seem like I'm complaining over nothing, but trying to, say, take notes off a web page in abiword would take much longer than with with a book, paper, and pencil, even assuming the person using it could type (unlikely).
How is this easier than GNOME, KDE, Aqua, XFCE, or even Windows?
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
I know I am sceptical as to the real benefits of the One Laptop Per Child project as to it's contribution to fighting poverty in the world. It is possible for some time to download the virtual image of the OLPC Linux version and I decided to give it a test drive. The main criterium I looked for wass desktop usability. Does it make sense and will it make life easier on the kids that have to work with it.
The main screen looks okay, but navigating it is very awkward. You have to move the mouse to the top and only then the dark grey menu bar appears. Then you have to move around the edges to get to the bottom where the applications are located. The buttons in the top left corner deal with various screen layout options. One option allows you to set all applications to the center of the screen.
Then you realize there are actually only five applciations available: an RSS feed, a chat program, a program that identifies itself with a drum but that doesn't make sense initially and Abiword. Strange enough the webbrowser is not loaded in the center screen option, but it is there.
That's it. Five applications, three of which you need an internet connection for.
Abiword is already a very light and versatile word processor and adding it to the OLPC really makes sense. But why does it have to be an extremely stripped version of Abiword. Even the complete version leaves a very small footprint. And where is the ubiquitous spreadsheet program? Is it not necessary for the kids in poor countries to be able to calculate?
The inclusion of the webbrowser does make sense, but you can only hope that the schools or the villages are willing to spend some money on a decent internet connection. Since you can hardly expect that, it leads to the conclusion that the disk space spend on chat and the RSS feeds has been wasted.
The overall usability is low. Very low. The interface and the icons are far from intuitive. And, for heavens sake, who decided that purple, light grey and dark grey are attractive colors for children? That team should have been sent to the likes of Toys R Us.
Nope, this interface and the choice of applications only add to my scepticism. The idea behind the project might have been good, but in the end it is disappointing.