Literacy Project/2012-05-22

Update from the field

Richard on Wonchi and Wolonchete <poem> R: They are farmers in Wolonchete, down the (mount). They grow potatoes, tef. Lots of dust and rocks near where we stayed.

On typical objects in the area R: I don't know how often the kids get into town, but we had 2 older people who came with us, with bottles for water.

 E: They are less than a mile from the main road. 

R: At Wonchi: carved stools and benches

 S: We learn all sorts of things outside our experience.   

M: It's good to know which pieces are new and which are familiar, and to ensure that familiar things are presented/learned E: Let's find ways to keep drawing more data out of what's been done and learned so far.

- Plumbing: battery discharging, clock resets, time used, use patterns
- Basic data: videos, reports, letter learning, vocalization.

M: Two big thoughts.

1. What are the big things we can be learning now? how to improve with new probes now?  basic principles: to analyze what we know, and when we can know it, about regularity of engagement.
   C: for each app, it would be great to id what is taught; what might be learned.
   M: an imperfect analysis of this would be nice.  Stephanie sent a matrix... 
   E: note richard's observation on app launches, below.
2. 

Tech challenges R: note that children have managed to do various things that should be protected by the password. 1. App launching 2. Orientation 3. Power button 4. Filesystem corruption 5. Date reset

App launching Some data is captuerd through funf. How accurate is it?

• We have a snapshot view of what apps are in memory.

 Is this regular?  No... though it's roughly a uniform sample.  And dates reset at times.
 It starts with the one currently in the foreground. Independent of whether the app launcher was used.

• We have data every time an app is launched (through the launcher... not via the Apps menu?)

 This is only a subset, but we have a minimum of the # of times some apps are launched.  Angela has that data.

• App switching is frequent. Kids switch all the time (and can have 15+ in memory)

 R: mostly at Wolonchete they were using the 2 new apps; went instantly to them.

• Video scanning: kids would scan quickly to the point they wanted.

 S: we're not probing scanning now, or how much of the video was watched. 
 QQ: Should we instrument/rebuild the video player?   Need to set priority.

Question: can we use our data to choose a selection to focus on by popularity?

 Given these runtime snapshots: if we just take the top app on that list, aggregated; is that a reasonable proxy for popularity?
 Minus videos... this would be good to correlate to launcher data. [all? videos show up as a single app]