edw-xo

Registered my Kaleidoscope Activity

2009-10-29T17:28:00.001-07:00

Today I registered my Kaleidoscope Activity on
http://activities.sugarlabs.org/ and
http://squeakland.org/
I wonder if it will get approved,
and what kind of feedback I will get...

First release: Kaleidoscope Activity

2009-10-26T10:33:00.001-07:00

I am happy to release the first version of my first Activity:
a Kaleidoscope written in Etoys.
Go get it from http://generalmagic.at/xo.
The .pr file is the Etoys project.
The .xo file is the same thing, packaged as an Activity (icon and all).
I am looking forward to hearing your feedback. Thanks!

Activity idea: Drum loops

2009-08-25T09:35:00.000-07:00

Similar to the Tam Tam stuff, but more focused on
doing drum loops and exploring rhythms. This is something
I myself want to use for a long time (I play guitar and
occasionally drums).

Anyway, all loop software I have seen use a
timeline, or piano roll representation.
But I want to focus more on the bars
as building blocks, representing them as
rectangular blocks.

Actvity idea: Coloring book

2009-08-25T08:58:00.000-07:00

This is yet another idea that came to me while playing with
my kids: create a Coloring book activity.
I would need to try and find some attractive black&white
drawings. The UI would consist of this drawing and a color palette
at the side (or bottom). Choose a color, click a white spot,
the spot is filled with that color (paint bucket).
Choose another color, click in the colored spot again, and you
get a gradient fill...
I am not yet sure what the best technology is for implementing
this. I think about looking into the SVG coloring code in python
for inspirations.

Activity idea: Kugelbahn

2009-08-25T08:53:00.000-07:00

Kugelbahn is the german word for Rolling ball sculpture.
When I first toyed with the Pippy Physics code, this immediately
came to my mind: create a small toolkit to construct a structure
and populate it with little balls that roll along.
Sound seems to be very important!

Later on I discovered the Physics Activity. This is very close
to what I have in mind. I am pondering the idea to make
a specialisation of this Activity to more closely mimic a
real construction kit.

Activity idea: Kaleidoscope

2009-08-25T08:49:00.001-07:00

I am currently focusing on Activities for Kindergarden age,
i.e. 4 to 6 year olds. The exerience with my own kids is that
they are having a hard time using the touch input; even the
mouse is difficult to use for them (on the carpet :)

One idea is to create a kaleidoscope: open an image, then
navigate a little tile within the picture and create a
repeated tile view. It's fun to just think about what
kind of geometric combinations are possible at all.

This could turn out as a little quiz, too (what does this
picture show?)

Speak activity, usability issues

2009-05-26T16:29:00.000-07:00

Even though the Speak activity has a very simple user interface, there are IMHO issues.

First, the keyboard "focus". Usually the focus is in the text input field. When you press Enter, the text is spoken. There is a button next to the text input field. When you click this button, a list of previously entered text is displayed. Now, if the button has the focus and you press Enter, the list pops up. Press Enter again, the list goes away, but the button keeps the focus. While I understand what is going on, I would rather like not need to explain this to my four-year old. Or to a six or seven year old child. I know it's a fact of life on all major platforms, but still. I think it would be great for the GUI to have a keyboard focus on text input fields only. Maybe as the default mode, with the option to drive buttons (and other widgets) with the keyboard when the kid is more experienced.

Second, the German voice cannot pronounce Umlauts correctly (although it can handle e.g. UE instead of Ü).

Third, the popup lists. I'll write about those next time.

I will need to find out where to report bugs (or rather, rants in this case), and how I can help to fix them...

Speak activity

2009-05-26T16:24:00.000-07:00

The Speak activity is one of my son's favourite. He can't read, write, or type, so we do this together. There are lots of fun situations, when e.g. he's asking a question, and the laptop answers them. This is sometimes quite puzzling for him, and I need to explain that the computer is not actually understanding what he was saying, but just speaking whatever I type into it.

Gregor knows a couple of English words (we read him childrens books in english sometimes, and also from CDs), and we get some mileage out of switching between English and German, and fooling around.

The children should own their laptops

2009-05-26T16:16:00.001-07:00

"The children should own their laptops". This is a quote I picked up while reading up on OLPC somewhere. So that's what I tried with my son, and he is very proud that he is given the responsibility. But there are, well, issues.
First, as he is four years old, he drags the laptop around rather clumsily sometimes. A standard netbook would not take this kind of handling well for a long time... So far, the XO is doing very very well.
He has not had any exposure to computers before, nor to video games or even TV. I realize that half an hour a day, or at most one hour, is about the limit for what seems to be good for him.
Which is of course a good source for debate, since he "owns" his laptop, it's difficult to explain why we need to restrict his time using it.

Activities for a four-year old child

2009-05-26T16:04:00.000-07:00

My son is now four years old; he is the very proud "owner" of an XO-1 now. For the first two weeks, we spent about 1 hour per day together exploring all activities that are available. Most of the activities require at least some amount of reading capability. While we were able to do some stuff with almost every Activity, my son quickly lost interest in the more complicated ones. The Activities that we have found most interesting were Maze, Speak and TuxPaint. I'll blog about those separately...

First meeting with Austrian OLPC guys

2009-05-26T15:53:00.000-07:00

I went to the meeting of the Austrian OLPC folks this month. Had the pleasure to finally meet with Christoph Derndorfer, a very nice guy! He is my "mentor" for my activities with the laptops.

Updating to 767

2009-05-06T06:44:00.000-07:00

The laptops had build 656 installed, so I updated them, using the Terminal activity:
$ su -
# olpc-update 767

So far, so good. After rebooting, the laptops insisted on updating their flash memory. This requires a connection to the power supply.
Which I did not yet have (the laptops came with US plugs). I have ordered simple adapters for use in Europe, but had not received them yet. So, after rummaging in my box of power adapters, I found one that fit the laptop, and everything went fine.

So be sure to have a power supply before doing a software update...

Bringing the laptops online

2009-05-05T12:47:00.000-07:00

I have a wi-fi router at home. Here is how i set up networking for the laptops:
First, i checked the mac addresses, using the Terminal activity and the command
$ /sbin/ifconfig

I configured the router to supply a static IP address for each laptop. Things worked like a charm, almost. I could ping the laptops from my desktop PC. The laptops could see each other in Network view. I tried to share some activities (Chat, Write), and the invitations showed up as expected, but...
the activities were not shared.

It turned out that I had to configure the router to allow network traffic between WLAN clients. On my router, a Zyxel P-334WT, this option is called "Enable Intra-BSS Traffic". On to more exciting stuff...

Welcome to edw-xo

2009-05-05T12:27:00.000-07:00

Hi, welcome to my blog. This blog is about the OLPC (see laptop.org). I have recently managed to get 2 XO-1 laptops. I intend to write up my experiences, and the experiences of my two kids, exploring the laptops and its software.