+== Fri, Mar 12 - Interview with //Los Scratcheros// ==
+
+|| {{ 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
+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.
+
+ * **What's your name?**
+ * B: Benedicto
+ * N: Nadia
+ * A: Alberto
+
+ * **How old are you?**
+ * B: 12
+ * N: 11
+ * A: 9
+
+ * **How did you learn Scratch?**
+ * B: We tried all the functions. First, we'll try one function, and see what it does.
+ * N: Like he said, we experimented with all the functions and check the results.
+ * A: By looking at the animations of the games bundled with Scratch
+
+ * **What job would you like to do when you're done with school?**
+ * B: Software engineer
+ * N: Paediatrician
+ * A: Nada... ;-)
+
+ * **Do you like Turtle Art? What can you do with it?**
+ * B: Si. I can create rectangles and other geometrical shapes.
+ * N: Mostly geometric shapes
+ * A: Only basic shapes: square, triangle...
+
+ * **How much time do you spend with your laptop every day?**
+ * B: A few hours.
+ * N: 6 hours, more or less.
+ * A: Same for me.
+ * (Mother's note: they don't use the laptop enough in school!)
+
+ * **Nobody is teaching you, yeah? You're learning everything on your own?**
+ * B: No, with my sister. We try all activities, and when we find one we like, we spend some time on it together.
+ * 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?**
+ * B: //Ablar 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...
+
+ * **What would you like to add to Sugar?**
+ * B: The "Snake" game
+ * N: Strategic games
+ * A: ...hmm...
+ * (Mom: They need an automatic spell checker... and a **screensaver**, of course).
+
+ * **What's the most annoying problem for you with Sugar?**
+ * B: Can't use the "robot" function in //Ablar con Sara// (
+ * N: I want bigger fonts in //Pintar// (Paint).
+ * A: //Escribir// (Write ;-)
+
+ * **Would you like to learn a little bit of Python with Pippy?**
+ * B: Very well!
+
+Then Benedicto and I got started. Python is easy, you can explain the basics to a smart kid in less than 30 minutes.
+I've shown him a few Pippy examples, describing the code briefly before running it, then making small changes to make
+Benedicto grasp the possibilities. From his questions and comments, I'm pretty sure that he could figure out the
+concepts despite my very poor Spanish fluency and my usual disorganized style.
+
+Nadia shows plenty of design talent: she uses Sugar to create short stories featuring her friends. She
+cookie-cuts their photos and uses Scratch to animate them on fantasy backgrounds with music, sound
+effects and text. Recently, she started creating line-art versions of the photos using eToys, so her
+new creations look more like cartoons. At this point, Benedicto mentioned the [[http://htf.atom.com/ | Happy Tree Friends]],
+an innocently named Internet series which makes even South Park seem politically correct in comparison!
+HTF is Flash-only and doesn't seem to work with Gnash -- at least, we should be above any bigot criticism
+for conveying "inapprorpiate content" to young hack^Wchildren.
+
+Nadia also created a platform videogame in which a dog needs to jump around to find the way out from
+each level, while a bouncing arrow chases him. Technically simple, but shows sensitive use of
+game-design principles. I'm not sure if the code is entirely new or comes in part from pre-existing
+Scratch games. It doesn't matter: in Free Software, remixing other people's work is the rule.
+
+We updated Benedicto's and Nadia's laptops to [[http://oficina.paraguayeduca.org/~bernie/py-xo1/ | F11-XO1 Paraguay, build 65]],
+which contains the latest release of [[http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.84/Notes | Sugar 0.84]]. Benedicto had been previously
+testing my build 45, revealing some bugs in networking and activities.
+
+|| {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/scratcheros/00005-game-written-in-scratch.jpg | maxwidth=480 | Perro Bros }} || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/scratcheros/00016-nadias-work-in-etoys.jpg | maxwidth=480 | Nadia's line-art image }} ||
+
+
+== Mon, Mar 8 - Children like Sugar, for the wrong reasons ==
+
+|| {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/cats/00001.jpg | maxwidth=480 | CATS, Fernando's XO repair lab in Caacupe }} || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/cats/00029.jpg | maxwidth=480 | Kids asking to install Sugar 0.84 in front of Cyber Nick's lab }} ||
+
+The owner of **Centro de Assistencia Tecnica y Soporte (CATS)**, the XO support center of
+[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caacup%C3%A9 | Caacupé]], wrote:
+
+{{{
+On March 8 2010 14:51, Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés wrote:
+> Fernando,
+>
+> How is the migration to Fedora 11 going so far? Approximate number
+> of machines to date?
+
+Raul, the truth that it's going smooth so far, the boys are very excited
+about the new version, and the rumor is spreading fast.
+I think so far my team updated 120 laptops, more or less.
+
+FG
+}}}
+
+(Google translation with my manual corrctions)
+
+I witnessed it with my own eyes: every day, children start lining up outside of CATS' door
+early in the morning, and keep coming all day long, until the evening. All of them ask
+for the new version, bui in interesting ways: a little boy said:
+
+ "//Quiero poner ventanas coloradas//" (I want colored windows).
+
+They're obviously referring to the Gnome desktop, also known as "//salva pantallas//" (screensaver).
+Another kid admired his freshly installed Gnome desktop and proudly declared: "//Ahora tienen Windows!//"
+(now I have Windows). In Spanish, therre's no ambiguity on the meaning of the word Windows.
+
+Power of brand. It doesn't rmatter if it's the actual Windows, or even if it really does
+anything useful at all. It's new, it's colored and it's what adults are using. Oh, and it
+also comes with a screensaver which makes it irresistible.
+
+So, what do we do? Quick! Let's add a cool screensaver to Sugar! :-)
+
+Of course not, but could we do anything to appeal more to kids? By now, I think I've observed
+our young users closely enough to be able to guess what they're really missing in Sugar:
+
+<div style="font-size: large; color: red; text-align: center">
+more configurability.
+</div>
+
+Yeah, dozen of scientific studies showed how users almost never customize the desktops beyond
+setting a background image. Kids, however, are a lot more passionate about their precious
+laptop than the average office clerk using Windows. They //do// cover the exterior of
+their laptops with colorful stickers.
+
+|| {{pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/escuela_691_profesora_gudelia_cabrera/00048.jpg | maxwidth=480 | Shy girls hide behind their Barbie-fashioned laptops }} || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/caacupe/scratcheros/00003.jpg | maxwidth=480 | A sugar "hack" (zoom in to see the ASCII art detail) }} ||
+
+Believe it or not, many of these kids also set their Home View with the random icon layout
+(aka "the Negroponte layout"), because it lets them drag icons around and arrange them in
+clever ways. I could take many screenshot to prove it, but I particulatily like this one
+abusing Sugar's user name field to create a drawing on three lines. These kids do not live
+in the middle of Silicon Valley; it is very likely that they rediscovered the technique
+of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art | ASCII art]] completely on their own.
+The original idea was passed along and successively refined by several anonymous artists.
+
+Finally, what was the gray-scale palette supposed to mean in our UI? I was explained it once,
+and it seemed to make some sense, but now I forgot. And, whatver the reason was, kids are
+unlikely to agree with us.
+
+Let's give our users a control panel applet for customizing colors as they wish, or they'll
+switch to Gnome //en masse//. I can't blame them, either. What would you have done when
+you were 8?
+
+
== Tue, Mar 02 - Charla @ Facultad Politecnica ==
Today I gave an opening talk at the [[http://www.pol.una.py/ | Facultad Politecnica de la Universidad Nacional de Asuncion]].
* [[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/sugar/slides/sugar-paraguay-v6-es.pdf | Spanish, PDF]]
* [[http://people.sugarlabs.org/bernie/sugar/slides/sugar-paraguay-v5-en.odp | English, OpenDocument]] (older version with fewer slides and some factual errors)
-{{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/00043.jpg | maxwidth=640 }}
-{{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/todos-son-maestros-y-alumnos.jpg | maxwidth=640 | Everyone is a learner and a techer}}
-{{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/la-base-pedagogica-de-sugar.jpg | maxwidth=640 | The pedagogical base of Sugar}}
-{{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/00048.jpg | maxwidth=640 }}
+|| {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/la-base-pedagogica-de-sugar.jpg | maxwidth=500 }} || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/todos-son-maestros-y-alumnos.jpg | maxwidth=500 }} ||
+|| {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/00043.jpg | maxwidth=500 }} || {{ pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica/00048.jpg | maxwidth=500 }} ||
See [[pictures/sugar/deployment/paraguay/facultad_politecnica | all the photos ]] in my Codew'z photostream.
-Note: I'm not really affiliated with MIT and I'm not even an engineer, but it's a very flattering mistake ;-)
+Note: I'm not really affiliated with MIT and I'm not even an engineer, but it's a flattering mistake ;-)
projects / wiki.git / blobdiff