Software Ideas

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Software Ideas

As the amount of information in Software Ideas has grown, several sections have been moved, without any change of content, each to a new page. Some small sections remain here and further new pages can be generated and content moved if the amount of content increases significantly.

Software Ideas - System Software

Software Ideas - End User Application Software

Software Ideas - Education

Keyboards and fonts

I work a lot with my mother and sister who are both Key Stage 1 teachers (thats four to seven year olds) here in the United Kingdom. One thing that they constantly complain about is the confusion that is created with inappropriate fonts for young children when they learn to read and write.

In particular you need to pay attention to the letter shapes of a, g, q, 3, 4 and 9. The closest fitting font that is widely available is Comic Sans, but this has no upwards flick on the lower case q and the digit 4 should be like an upper case L with a vertical line through the digit.

Good point. Since the developers cannot predict where such difficulties could arise with all the different scripts and fonts, perhaps a stripped down version of FontForge could be shipped with the units. At the very least, the deployment process should include a step where native speakers of each target language review the fonts and document where changes could make it clearer for children. In the absence of a corrected font, some e-book lessons on character shapes would go a long way to helping clear up the kids' confusion.

I was showing them photographs of the laptop and explaining what it was all about, which they thought was absolutely brilliant. However the first thing they commented on was that the letters on the keyboard where upper case rather than lower case and even then the letter shapes where all wrong.

The suggestion from my sister was that it would be good if you could have interchangable keys so that they could start off with a lowercase one and then switch to upper case as they progressed. Perhaps not practical, but lower case versions should be available for younger children. You will need to have lots of keyboard variants anyway as US layout won't do in India or China etc. It's the one component you will need to change depending where it is going to be used.

This is, of course, already planned. By the way, the upper/lower case variation is only found in the Latin/Greek/Cyrillic group of scripts. Most languages do not have this.
I remembered seeing a thread entitled Font for teachers in the Gallery forum at High-Logic http://forum.high-logic.com so I looked it up and found the AJoanhand font is still available from a link in the http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?t=296 thread. It has the q and 4 in the form that you want them to be.
The main page for High-Logic is http://www.high-logic.com where their products are introduced: these include a fontmaking program.


Commoditization or ALSO New Concepts?

Perhaps the major challenge for the initiative is to decide if it is to be a commoditizer or innovator and provider of new capabilities/paradigms. With all the creative capital available in and around the project (e.g. Alan Kay, Prof. Negroponte and others affiliated with the MIT Media Lab) it is hoped that the answer is BOTH - and that the device will include important new hardware, software, communication and media features/concepts. The initiative can take on the spirit of the French Minitel project (and of the peripherally related Centre Mondial) or of the Xerox PARC "Alto" project. The first initiative's central idea was to give away under $100 terminals in France as phone book replacements and it had a significant innovative impact. The latter redefined the industry and created today's Apples, Microsofts, Suns, Logitecs, etc. and made computing and communication approachable to everyone.

L Pfeffer March 18, 2006

People with opinions on this should weigh in with specific Applications to adopt as suggestions.

Interface Design

Is anyone working explicitly on the interface design for OLPC? Kids != adults. There are HCI studies devoted entirely to open source and kids, and it would be useful to talk to those researchers and run prototypes by kids in different countries even before the laptop itself was finished/testable (have people go out to schools with their own laptops and ask the kids to play with some cheap prototypes, even if they're simple html/php/flash pages or even with paper protoypes). user:mchua

The user interface is called Sugar. If you only want to see some samples of the planned interface, this page has 640x480 images.

Per Country Web Portal

For each country that is buying these laptops, a form of educational body within each country submits and updates its own web portal of web links covering the following and this is the default page for the webrowser included on the machines;

Educational Topics http:/... http:/... Practice Exercises http:/... http:/... Things to Do http:/... http:/...

Forum Technical FAQ chat web search eg google Etc...

Client/Server

If people have no access to the internet communication gets difficult. The mesh network is good for enabling network, but does not replace a server.

The server can be the teachers laptop with a big harddisk but needs special software.

  • Apache, PHP (MySQL optional)
  • File server
  • Jabber - server (JEP-0166: Jingle for VoIP)
  • Wikipedia
  • Mail server
  • Ruby/Rails ???
  • Software distribution - one of the tiny Linuxes can work here.

A dedicated "tree mounted" server would have better WiFi connection.

The Motoman project in Cambodia is affiliated with the OLPC project. They established that a mesh network really can work well. That doesn't mean there are no servers. It means any machine can function as a server.

What about Educational Games/Toy Programs?

If kids don't see learning as fun, they won't seek it out readily. Making educational games available under an open license encourages kids not only to play and learn from games, but also to edit and learn from editing games. Sure, someone will make immature modifications to existing games, but they will learn from going into the code, and they will feel like they accomplished something. Encouraging and empowering kids is what this project is about, right? Also, "toy" programs could be very useful for younger children (say, it "reads a story" every night, either aloud or printed). These could enhance the feeling that each laptop is that child's own possession, and also provide something for children to use together. They could share data, like trading monsters in some games, or just talk physically about how they did something or will do something in a virtual environment.

However keep in mind that there is a difference between Edutainment and and Playful Learning. And we want Playful Learning instead of Edutainment. Also, we don't want kids to be punished by rewards.

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