Making Sugar sweet Experiences in creating a great user experience with UI design. 10/08/09

Our community Sugar Labs, a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy is a community of volunteers. Sugar is free software; it is licensed under the General Public License (GPL), versions 2 and 3.

Context 3 Learning has a bearing on all of the challenges our children will inherit.

Children don’t get ideas; they make ideas. They construct knowledge in the context of building personally meaningful artifacts. —Kafai and Resnick

The challenge going to scale

A child's laptop is... Safe and robust; Light to carry; Vibrant to look at; Low power; Used outdoors; Helps them communicate and interact; Encourages them to express themselves; Lets them engage in open-ended discovery; And of course... inexpensive!

aside Sugar is a testament to the power and quality of the development tools and processes used by the Free Software community.

The Sugar Learning Platform Sugar facilitates exploring, collaboration, and reflection and to encourage critical thinking.

Originally developed for the OLPC XO Sugar is largely platform-agnostic. It can run on almost any computer, even the old, obsolete hardware typical of schools.

It's an education project Sugar is used every school day by one-million children.

Learning ≠ Windows Nothing in our children's future resembles office work from the 1970s.

Sugar users Sugar “learners” create demonstrations, projects, and critiques. They develop craft, engage and persist, envision, express, observe, reflect, stretch and explore, and understand. They engage in open-ended discovery, going far beyond the use of the computer as a means of access to information.

“ ถ่ายดอกกระเจียว เห็นไหม ”

User-centric design metrics (Nielsen) Learnability: How fast can a user learn a new system? Efficiency: How fast can a user perform tasks? Memorability: How easily can a user reestablish fluency? Errors: How often do user make errors? Satisfaction: How satisfied is the user?

Learning-centric design (Soloway) Learning: How do our design decisions impact learning?

Simplicity is not the goal We can use UI design to reduce complexity or to enable the user to reach to complexity. time complexity Buxton's Law God's Law

The culture of Free Software Free-software developers go beyond consuming; they create and they share their creations. Most important, they engage in criticism. They take nothing at face value.

Learning software must be Free Software With Sugar: children create content as well as consume it; children share their creations and help each other; and they engage in self-reflection and group critique.

Sugar core ideas Activities, not applications Presence is always present Tools of expression Journal/portfolio

Low floor, no ceiling Sugar places an emphasis on usability and discoverability.

Reading and writing and sharing

A network neighborhood

Dos and many don'ts Do use hover Do use consistent color and icon models No right click No double click No overlapping windows No “eye candy” No 3-D

Guided discovery to start clearscreen make “box1 1 setpensize 20 repeat 1300 [forward :box1 right 91 setpencolor division xcor 6 setshade heading make “box 1 sum :box1 1] end

Collaboration

Journal

View Source

Crumple zone: copy on write

Modifying physics elif event.key == K_h: self.setdensity=10 elif event.key == K_l: self.setdensity=0.1 elif event.key == K_n: self.setdensity=1

Under the hood Sugar is built on top of the GNU/Linux desktop: GTK+, X11, D-Bus, NetworkManager, Gconf, Telepathy, etc. Sugar provides data-storage service and presence service through D-Bus (Sugar activities can be coded in any programming language). The majority are written in Python, which takes advantage of binding in the Sugar-Toolkit.

Freedom and empowerment Sugar is about creativity, fluency, innovation, and problem-solving, all of which involve personal expression. Sugar bring the tools of expression within reach of children so that they can be free to change their world. The mantra of the next generation will be “show me the code and I will make it even better.”

Thank you