Re: Overview, roadmap, priorities
Greetings!
Giving this just a bit of thought, it would appear to me that what
would best appeal to our children about Debian is what best appeals to
us: a solid means of access to and analysis of real information, a
helpful worldwide community to aid in learning, and freedom from
marketing mind manipulation, condescension, coercion and pandering to
baser instincts.
I'll never forget my 4 yr old's frustration with a Windows Winnie the
Pooh alphabet game. The program told her what to do, while in Linux,
she told the program what to do. That about sums it up for me: are we
mindless sheep to be pacified and entertained, or is the computer a
tool which should flexibly bend to our will as we pursue a line of
investigation?
This to me is the only real area where we even have a chance to
distinguish ourselves. Windows will always be slicker, smoother, more
comfortable. But if we can elicit that chortle from an awakened mind
as it recognizes the limitation and atrophy that sets in from a video
game culture, then we can be known as the OS of choice for kids who
want to use their computer to learn what *they* want to learn, to
explore, to try out new ideas not already thought of by a program
designer.
Of course, the above is no doubt too extreme, but I'm trying to write
this quickly.
Bringing all this to a child's level is no easy task, but not
impossible, IMHO. We need to observe their moments of enlightenment,
as opposed to entertainment, and try to reproduce the conditions that
led to that moment. Perhaps a good place to start would be to
assist in assembling a high quality body of information of interest to
children from public sources on the web, and presenting it locally on
the system, free from adds, web page redesigns, and slow connections,
and with high quality searching facilities.
Take care,
Ben Armstrong <synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca> writes:
> On 17 Jul 2000, Camm Maguire wrote:
> > Greetings! Some kind of overview on work needing to be done, with
> > priorities, would be great to develop on this list. Packaging stuff
> > is a lot easier than conceiving what a useful system would contain.
>
> Good stuff,
>
> Well, in terms of packaging "an OS our children want to run", I'm afraid
> this goal is going to constantly get muddled with my own ideas as a parent
> of what is best for the kids.
>
> There are, of course, the goals you have already seen at:
>
> http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr
>
> Re-reading those, does that spark any ideas?
>
> Observing the kids over the last couple of months, I was intrigued to find
> that my 10-year-old daughter is captivated by a handful of very simple
> programs to which she has unrestricted access throughout the day:
>
> 1. dict
>
> 2. boggle (from bsdgames)
>
> 3. hangman (also from bsdgames)
>
> There are special "video game" turns throughout the week which are limited
> in length. We are increasingly uncomfortable with the legal issues
> surrounding the non-free games our kids like, and would like to see those
> be replaced with free ("guilt-free" :) alternatives.
>
> Also, I observed friend of my daughter's with her new (to her :) 486 that
> we found for her, with 8M & running win 3.1 (well, that was the easiest in
> terms of administration, and a match for the pathetic hardware). I asked
> her if she'd like me to download anything for her. She remarked that she
> mostly liked the card game (solitaire) and would like to see some word
> games.
>
> I guess it depends on the interests of the children, but the common thread
> that seems to emerge is that they are easily hooked on things that involve
> exploration (the word games & dictionary being ways of exploring &
> expanding the world of words) with their computers. There are many other
> such "worlds" to explore. And that's one direction we might take the
> building of a list of priorities.
>
> But then there are more mundane elements of a system, too, that are hidden
> to the user. We've explored already some sys admin issues. Perhaps one
> area that I think might be a place to start is tools for easily subsetting
> the available commands on the system for easier access by a targetted set
> of users. I'm thinking of the menu system, primarily. Each user, by
> default, gets the whole mess of programs installed on their system that
> have been entered into the menu system. Sure, some breaking down of those
> into categories has already been done, and that's a bit of a help (e.g. my
> kids probably are more interested in the stuff under "Games" than "Apps ->
> Programming") Would it be helpful to provide the adminstrator with an
> easy way of managing different menu subsets for different user groups?
> I've tried a bit of tweaking of the menu system myself, and I just wasn't
> satisfied with the amount of hand-massaging was required.
>
> Just so we don't get off on a tangent on that one, I'm not sure that
> narrowing down options is such a big priority. After all, it seems to be
> a bit contrary to "exploring worlds" that I mentioned earlier.
>
> Well, I'd better stop rambling and let some others throw their ideas in.
> Where do we start? What are our top priorities? What packages should be
> tackled first?
>
> Ben
> --
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--
Camm Maguire camm@enhanced.com
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