+== Sun, Mar 14 - What are kids using Sugar for? ==
+
+I'm finally back in Asuncíon. Over the last few days, I had the
+opportunity to interview a dew dozen children who had been
+using Sugar 0.82 for about one year. Perhaps the most interesting
+and controversial finding was which activities are the most
+popular among them:
+
+ 1. [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(video_game) | Doom II]]
+ 2. [[http://www.pixelprospector.com/indev/2009/12/super-vampire-ninja-zero/ | Super Vampire Ninja Zero]]
+ 3. [[http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4024 | Navegar]] (Browse)
+
+{{podium.png}}
+
+Heh, at least Browse made the third place, I thought. But when I
+asked what websites they were visiting, the answer was invariably
+"videos".
+
+Well, at the least I could tell they were answering honestly!
+We often idealize our young users as being creative, passionate and
+eager to learn just about everything. Some kids are really
+like this, I met some in Caacupé. However, the naked truth is that the
+vast majority would rather spend their free time playing.
+
+Doom is one of the most popular games of all time, to the extent
+that the first 7 hits for the word "doom" are
+about the game itself. Then come the film adaptation and various
+fan sites. After all, many of us played Doom and many other types of
+"inappropriate" video games throughout our childhood.
+Anyway, how can we blame kids for playing games?
+
+We took down Doom from the OLPC wiki soon after it was uploaded,
+yet it is still spreading fast among Sugar users worldwide. Let's look at the
+positive sides: it shows social behavior and encourages
+kids to find technical solutions to transfer activities
+directly (their old version of Sugar does not allow direct
+sharing from the journal).
+
+What about the videos? The most popular video websites are
+[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash | Flash]] based.
+You Tube would work with [[http://www.gnashdev.org/ | Gnash]] as well,
+but because the required video codecs are [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues | patent encumbered]],
+we're not allowed to ship them in Fedora. Besides,
+both Flash and Gnash are quite inefficient and would feel
+sluggish on the XO-1.
+
+So I am left wondering what solutions these kids came up with
+in order to circumvent the technical limitations and watch
+their favorite videos.
+
+The coordinator of the education team got curious and asked questions.
+It seems that some smart kids figured out how to rip videos from You Tube,
+store them in the journal, and then play them back with some
+[[http://www.olpcnews.com/software/applications/using_an_xo_laptop_a.html | clever hackery]].
+We do not know the details of how this is done, but it is quite impressive.
+
+Even though most kids are inclined to misuse our precious educational
+technology for gaming and other mundane uses, in order to do what they want,
+they seem to be acquiring pretty advanced problem-solving abilities
+in a self-motivated and social way; in other words, the purpose for which
+OLPC and Sugar were created.
+
+
== Fri, Mar 12 - Interview with //Los Scratcheros// ==
+(photos courtesy of Carla Crosa)
+
|| {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/scratcheros/00008.jpg | maxwidth=480 | The "Scratcheros": Nadia, Benedicto and Alberto}} || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/scratcheros/1.00011.jpg | maxwidth=480 | Albertito, our youngest volunteer, helping one of our trainers }} ||
-Today I spent some time with three siblings of Caacupe who has impressed me and the educators very
+Today I spent some time with three siblings of Caacupé who has impressed me and the educators very
much with their original creations in Scratch. Scratch is not a school subject, these kids are
learning it on their own driven by their own passion.
* N: I learned the basics of Turtle Art at the trainer's course.
* A: Yes, I learned it there too.
- * **What other activities do you like besides Scatch and Turtle Art?**
+ * **What other activities do you like besides Scratch and Turtle Art?**
* B: //Hablar con Sara// [Speak] and //Super Vampire Ninja Zero//, //Máquina de discos// (Jukebox).
* N: //eToys//, to edit photos. I need someone to teach me all the rest.
* A: //Grabar// (Record), to take videos, interview people...
projects / wiki.git / commitdiff
