Web editor

A possible way to enhance the concept of "activities" is with the introduction of "web-activities". These would be available as online web pages, instead of being physically installed in the laptop. To make these web-activities, kids would need some sort of glorified web editor, installed as a conventional activity in the laptop. To produce articulated web pages, in addition to HTML, this editor would allow the inclusion of some AJAX [1] capabilities in the page, such as easy links to APIs for products like Google Maps [2].

User Interface

The user interface would need to be easy and intuitive (something like Etoys for example, with possibility to look at the code, using the Develop activity), but powerful enough to be able to create rich content.

Advantages

The advantage to have such program is 2-fold. First the produced pages would reach a much larger audience, which could potentially add data and content to the same page (as in wikipedia [3]). One could use Google pages [4] to make simple HTML pages. However, the AJAX part is what would bring it to the next level (web 2.0 [5]). For example kids could develop a page where they can monitor the temperature of their village/town through the year. The website would be set up so that an interactive map (like the Google mapping [6] service) would appear, and other kids (or regular users) could add similar statistics for their town/village/city. Everything would be accessible by everybody.

The idea to integrate mapping to the actual web-activity would be the natural extension of the "neighborhood view" in Sugar (where kids can see what other people are doing in their virtual neighborhood). This global map would be a sort of "world neighborhood". Kids using this page (created by other kids) would then be able to access to a set large of data from which they could develop further activities or learn from them (in the example above, learn the fluctuation in temperatures in different geographic regions).