On Monday 19th January, the olpc.at group was scheduled to meet 6 educators in various fields for a combined workshop, and mutual feedback session. The meeting was off to a rocky start with neither collaboration via the local AP working, nor many of the apps on the Ubuntu sugar stick running well. On previous days I had tested many of the apps and found them to be non-functional or wrongly sized for the resolution, or lacking network neighbourhood views.
This turned out to be an advantage in a way, as it brought up a discussion on what the educators present would like to see happen in terms of customised activities and collaborative possibilities. I'll try and list them in some organised fashion, based on activity.
The first activity that was questioned was flipsticks, which was seen as a great tool for younger kids, but lacking collaborative abilities. An idea which was brought up was splitting the flipsticks work into user groups, and have the groups then combine their animations to create a bigger final animation. The reasoning behind this was that often there is not much time in a class, and to have every student to their little bit, and then combine it all is much more efficient, and a lesson in collaboration at the same time.
- Geoquiz and other visual quiz activities
Another suggestion that came after showing Geoquiz was the development of some sort of authoring tool for this kind of activity, which generally involves showing images and asking questions. This could then be applied for many localised activities. In the case of Austria, for example, children of a younger age learn about Austria itself, in a geographical sense, but not too much about the rest of the planet until they are older. The Geoquiz activity as it stands was criticised for not telling a user when an answer is correct or wrong, for not having good controls, and for having unchangable content. The other option that would be a requirement for these kind of activities is a score card or report that the teacher could somehow store and print, based on children collaborating on quiz type activities. It is good to know that there are currently Sugar developers that are working on implementing some of these features, and really make a generic quiz generator that could be used for any subject.
- Other Quiz type examples that were brought up
Examples of quiz type activities that were brought up were types of flowers, the environment, nature, animals, the house, etc.
- Main subject matter requested as simple activities with lesson plans
The main subjects that were requested were German (first language) and Mathematics, which seems to coincide with the requirements of other deployments like the Nepali deployment. In terms of mathematics, these activites should be as simple as possible, for example, the multiplication/division/adding/subtraction tables done in such a way that the teacher could choose which numbers were to be selected and practiced on any given day and by any given student. It should also, then, be possible to pair up students collaboratively to answer these, and once again, at the end of the session, collect the answers in a score card or report, that could be saved or printed by the teacher.
- Typing tutor or spelling activities
In a similar vein, some kind of activity for practicing spelling should be implemented and monitored in the same way as a maths apps... A general request for all activities was the ability to have an admin view/session that the teacher could use to follow scores, assignment of individual objects of a particular activity and their layout, and the users themselves. This would be something like a monitoring tool.
- Simple UI and Simple app rules
It was emphasised that the simplicity of applications is extremely important for younger children, and that many ported apps are just too cluttered to be useful in any way. They were very happy with the simplicty and usability of sugar itself, but were disappointed with many of the apps, which either ignored design conventions or were simply ports of already complex and badly layed out activities.
- Collaborative typing tool with speed recognition
Another example of an application they wanted to see was a simple typing activity which would involve the teacher typing an example text, and then the kids trying to type the same phrase as quickly as possible with the times to completion and error/rate being calculated for each child, and then reported to a score card or report followed by saving of this or printing out.
- Gcompris is a hit, but needs the admin tool
While we focused on presenting gcompris as a great tool for younger children with hundreds of mini apps, it was asked if one could seperate these mini apps into layouts for particular groups of students, or individual students, and again have a central admin part to keep track of what children are working on and even suggest a progression plan (activities to be worked through and scores for those activities to be achieved.) G compris already has an admin part and this should be included within sugar, as it seems to be a vital component to get it to be anything more than a fun experimental game.
- The simplest app wins (speak)
The app they found most to their liking due to its simplicity and the fun surrounding it was the speak application. The criticism was that speak should really be having the letters sound like they do in words. For example, 'M' should be pronounced mmmm and not emmm. This would require the fixing of only the sound bytes of single characters.
- Meshed collaboration extremely shaky, especially with more than 6 users.
There was some skepticism as to how well collaboration would work as we seemed unable to get it to work well due to multiple wireless signals. A server was suggested by us to overcome this and other issues (storing of lesson plans for the activities in moodle, backups to prevent local storage problems, ejabberd for collaboration between xos and non-xos.)
- Sugar on a stick, sugar on Ubuntu not Ready
Finally, it was concluded by us after presenting sugar on a stick with the very latest binaries and packages, that, at least on ubuntu, sugar is not ready for even experimental use, as more than 50% of the apps do not work, and networking seems to be broken too.
Present at the deployment were me and Christoph Derndorfer, as well as the education specialists themselves.
