[olpc-software] AbiWord, HIG

[Alan Kay]

Hi Robert --

At 09:30 AM 3/19/2006, Robert Staudinger wrote:
>On 3/18/06, Alan Kay <alan.kay at squeakland.org> wrote:
> > You might try icons that have been painted by the child's paint tool. Then
> > the child could add some.
>
>Are you referring to the Etoys paint tool or is there a tool / list of
>candidates for the laptop already?

As I mentioned, I'm not trying to push our system here, except as a set of 
examples (and as an integrated example).

But it would be nice if the children's UI was actually made in the child's 
system -- this would allow the children to have a deeper view of how things 
are made, and also all them to add new facilities, etc..


> > To bring you up to date on what we've been doing with children the last 10
> > years or so, here are two white papers about Squeak Etoys that you can go
> > to directly: http://www.squeakland.org/pdf/etoys_n_learning.pdf ,
> > http://www.squeakland.org/pdf/etoys_n_authoring.pdf .
>
>I have been skimming these documents and the ideas are certainly very 
>appealing.
>Do you have any experience with productivity software following that approach?

Good question. Of course, much of the productivity SW of today is based on 
the predecessors of these ideas that we did at Xerox PARC. So there is some 
experience there.

But what we are trying to do here is more subtle. For constructivist 
learning, we want to have the end-users learn by making most things. On the 
other hand we want to be as handy as most productivity tools (where there 
are usually a lot more prefabbed parts). We thought that something 
influenced by Hypercard but with much deeper objects and scriptable all the 
way down would serve both as a learning environment and as a productivity tool.

Since it is "Children first" on this project, we think the constructivist 
parts should predominate.

Naturally, we'd hope to improve where we've gotten so far by the time HDLT 
ships.

Cheers,

Alan


>Best,
>Rob