Re: Kid profiles
On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 12:07 +0200, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis) wrote:
> creating a packaged set of profiles is perfectly doable (the
> desktop-profiles packages provides a cross-desktop way of managing the
> profiles) the hard part is definining what should go in into the profiles,
> so lets get started on that :-)
When you say cross-desktop, does that include systems with only a WM and
not GNOME or KDE?
> so what kind of setups do we want? I think they should probably be based on
> skills and interests like Ben proposed (doesn't preclude an addition set of
> age-based profiles, can be done in parrallel). Sofar I've seen mentioned:
> - able to read or not
> - needs more then basic mouse skills, or not
> - can be used without mouse or not
Seems like a reasonable subset to start. I don't think at this point we
need to expand any further until we have something working.
> As for defining profiles by interest ben mentioned that it's hard to predict
> what kids will be interested in, so what we need is an easy way to add
> stuff when kids indicate they're interested in something,
There are two possible ways to add things, too. One is to request the
sys admin to install something (usually from a request like "Dad, can
you find some Star Trek games? is there a game like this ... ? is there
a program that will let me do that ... ?) The other is to add something
to the desktop that is already there. For instance, my 11-year-old uses
the Debian menu system and knows how to read and find new things. My 7
and 4-year-olds might see him using something cool and want to use it
too, except they don't know how to find it.
Each family will be different. I don't know how to make meaningful
categories that would be applicable for other families. I have a
feeling what we really want to do is just expand on debtags and somehow
empower the children who are capable enough to find things so that they
can find things on their own.
> desktop-profiles
> provides most of that, for example:
> you could have a profile that puts icons for programs helping you develop
> your mousehandling skills on your desktop if the $HOME/.jr-profilestextfile
> contains the tag mousehandling (as long as you can phrase the condition for
> activation as 'when this shell command executes succesfully' or 'is part of
> group X' desktop-profiles will facilitate that, so the actial condition can
> be pretty much anything)
Sounds good.
> -> Questions:
> - what kind of subdivisions are helpfull (and don't lead to hundreds of
> different profiles)? We should document the kind of settings we want for
> each profile, so they can be implemented easily for the different desktops
I don't think interest-based subdivisions are very useful, but a few
capabilities-based subdivisions might be, such as the ones we've
identified above.
> -> what kind of mechanism do we want for activating/deactivating the
> different profiles, will the textfile one I outlined above do (along with
> maybe a simple gui to let parents configure it), or do we want something
> else?
It makes sense, I think, for those helping children with their systems
to make the decision about what capabilities-based profile is set per
child's account. A text file is fine for now. A gui could be added
later.
> -> we should probably set up a team of people that implement the different
> profiles for the different desktops (I'll volunteer for KDE) once we've
> documented what each should do.
Our family uses GNOME, so we can help with that.
After a bit of consultation with my family, we think roughly speaking
the age+capability groups would be:
1. beginner : beginning mouse & keyboard skills (up to age 6)
2. novice : novice mouse & keyboard skills, beginning reading skills
(between ages 6 and 8)
3. master : mastery of mouse, keyboard and reading (ages 8 and up)
Ben
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