Today was my first day of a 4 day teaching marathon with Sugar in a primary school in Berlin. I have a different class each day. 8-10 I have the first half of the class, about 14 kids, then the second half from 10-12. There are 4th, 5th and 6th grade classes.
As an introduction into Sugar I like to do the creating of Memory games. This is a fun task for everyone to do and involves the use of several activities: Paint, Browse to download images and sounds, Record to capture pictures and sounds and of course Memorize itself. Several peripheries, audio input, camera input, audio output. They make extensive use of the Journal as well. I use Fedora 11 and a ‘customized’ Sugar 0.84 for the course.
Experiences from today:
1) Google images is not appropriate for finding pictures, for young kids! A too high percentage of the content is sexual or simply rotten. An alternative is the kid’s search engine Blinde Kuh. Though, I find it a bit hard to use for image searching. The engine milkmoon works better for those purposes. I will see how far we can get with this tomorrow. And I will animate the kids to create content in Paint. For example someone created flags in paint today, quite cool.
2) Sound: People are visual! Not so many kids want to choose to work with sounds. They like to play the sound example in memorize, though. Maybe they think it is too hard? For my class I have uploaded a few sound files from the excellent olpc sound bank. Unfortunately, the bank is not as easy to browse when one is looking for a specific sound. There is a big archive at tierstimmen.org, but I only found mp3’s so far.
3) Annoying “Naming Alert”: As much as I am a friend of highlighting the naming, tagging and description purposes, I don’t think the alert is a good way to ‘enforce’ this. I think those actions are not first class ones. I am happy when the kids understood the concept of the Journal a bit, but they will not start to make better descriptions in the first Sugar days or weeks, with or without the alert. For now, it is just a confusing dialog that pops up when you close an activity. And later, once the kids would know about the importance they would be better served with other tools. For example an option in the activity toolbar (like we have for the title already). From my experience I highly recommend to remove the alert, +1 when for 0.86 already.
4) Spell-Checker: Many kids have spelling difficulties. I would like to see this added as an overall tool to the platform (frame device or similar, like Sayamindu suggested for the translate one as well). The thing is, I do not want to make it too easy. If it is too easy, the kids will just rely on it, and do not think about the correct spelling themselves, and then are unable to spell the word without Sugar. Maybe a gratification system would be a good solution. For example, if I type in a word and I get it right (so mainly to verify that it is correct) I could get a point into the Journal (using good old Bubble-Bubblo-fruit-style-coins for example).
More infos from the field tomorrow.
Tags: Planetarium, Sugar
+1 on removing the “naming alert”, this has been bugging me since day one.
Adding “rewards” to the Journal is also something that David Van Assche and Gary C Martin discussed quite a bit Paris. Unfortunately nobody had the time to really follow up on these discussions with some actual code:-/
What sort of pictures were you looking for?
Would Wikipedia work for the pictures? I liked working with it because I knew the content including the pics would be CC and I hoped that the students would, over time, see it as a resource where they could find out more about topics, not just a place to get images.
Were you working with their vocabulary word list?
Thanks for the great report!
You are right there are two issues with pictures:
1. The licensing one: Wikipedia pictures are great in that regard. I just tried the creative common search, but I do not think all the pictures were cc licensed actually. Maybe someone knows others? And then of course one can animate people to create cc content.
2. Limiting the search and show only for kids appropriate ones: the milkmoon search engine is a first step into that direction.
For both examples running an own server with open licensed content that has been approved would be the ideal solution. But this is costly of course. I think olpc Afghanistan is doing that for example.
Just found another image gallery for education from the UK: http://gallery.nen.gov.uk/index.php?