February 8th, 2008 ( Updated: March 9th, 2008 )
SCALE 6x LiveBlogging: Linux in Early Education
LA is wearing her typical veil of grey-brown smog. I've been here for enough hours that I can't really smell it anymore – or much of anything else, for that matter. I'm at the LA Airport Weston with the rest of the SCALE 6x attendees.
I'm sitting in Steve Oualline's session on Linux in Early Education. I know Steve from his excellent Vim cookbook (and other books.)
There 50+ people attending. Steve Oualline is joined by the cute-as-a-cute-button daughter Grace Oualline, who is four years old.
Point form, here are some messy notes on what Steve covered in the session.
- This session is based around how Grace uses Linux
- Steve wrote some custom software for Grace (and learned a bunch of things about this problem space at the same time)
- There is some existing software available
- Steve promises to go over what Grace likes
- (At this point, Grace is intermittently frolicking around the front of the room.)
- Steve wrote a program to teach Grace words (when she was about 1.5 years old.)
- The idea was that she would press key and would be shown an image, a word and hear a sound. eg. A is for Apple
- It was too complex for such a young child.
- Steve changed it so that it worked so that pressing any key would cause a picture to show.
- Grace loved it and would play with it for quite a long time.
- The only trouble was that she would indicate that she was done with the program by dropping the keyboard.
- Steve found out things about how to repair keyboards.
- Steve tried the commercial program called Jumpstart Advanced Toddler
- It lets the child use a mouse to select specific parts of an image, click them and be shown a video.
- It was too difficult for her at that age.
- When she was two, Steve created another program for her.
- It was simple - press a key and a specific video will play.
- In a few months, she learned the location of the keys.
- Learned location of keys in about 2 months.
- Later on, Steve made a modified version of this program that used a counting interface to access the videos.
- Now Steve starts talking about existing Free Software/Open Source programs (and a few commercial programs) for early education.
- gcompris – An eclective collection of learning games. Some games are strange. Online help is not good for children. By far the nicest suite. It could use help from educators to improve some things. Lets you to turn off the irritating music, which Steve likes.
- childsplay – A "gcomprise light". Not as many names, not as good, can't turn off the irritating music (which Steve now hates more than the Barney song.)
- tuxpaint – Good drawing software for children.
- tuxtype – Games are a bit strange. Restarting is difficult.
- Edubuntu – Not recommended. The collection is too disorganized.
- Commercial software is written by people who want money
- Features are added for marketing purposes.
- Designed to be sold.
- Open source software is designed to be used.
- Unfortunately, engineers are often not deeply skilled at designing educational software.
- Steve notes that Grace isn't easy on CDs. He recommends duplicating the CDs and/or running them off the hard drive.
- Before Grace, computers in the Oualline household were open. Afterwards, screensaver's were set to lock.
- Steve uses a separate X session for Grace. Grace only needs to press CTRL-ALT-7 to switch to her session – even when Steve's session is locked. Steve notes that this just isn't safe to do on XP – it is too easy for the child to damage the entire system by trashing their own account.
- Steve then starts outlining his views on the pros/cons of proprietary vs. Open Source early learning software:
- commercial - audio instruction / os - daddy has to read instructions
- commercial: mouse / os - mouse/keyboard
- commercial: higher production values / os - not so nice
- commercial software: price drops - features stale / os: features improve
- commercial: organized / os: ad hoc - everything in the kitchen sink
- commercial: officially supported (but hard to get) / os: officially unsupported / but support from forums/mailing lists
- commercial: design often sketchy / os: same
- Tangent on the differences between Windows / Linux learning metaphors - I'm just skipping it.
- Then we get a demo from Grace (after some tweaking to make things work with the projector)
- Grace starts zipping through the programs – showing that she knows the alphabet and so on – even though she is only four years old.
- Then she plays with the boat lock game (which is a bit complex) in gcompris
- Steve notes that Grace gets tired of gcompris quickly
- Then they go on to number game that Steve built, where you need to count the number of dots and enter them into the computer to get a video to play.
- Finally, Grace demos TuxPaint
Overall, it was a charming session.
You can get more information at http://oualline.com/scale
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Posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 15:55
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February 15th, 2008 at 20:22
[...] Zak Greant: SCALE 6x LiveBlogging: Linux in Early Education (tags: scale6x education zak great) [...]