OLPC Announces First-of-Its-Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer.Sugar Interface is Designed to Foster Collaborative Learning Collaborative learning is an umbrella term for a variety of approaches in education that involve joint intellectual effort by students or students and teachers. Collaborative learning refers to methodologies and environments in which learners engage in a common task in which each among Children in Developing Countries CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- One Laptop per Child See OLPC. (OLPC (One Laptop per Child, Cambridge, MA, www.laptop.org) A research initiative of MIT Media Labs devoted to the creation of a $100 PC for educating children in developing countries around the world. ), a non-profit organization A non-profit organization (abbreviated "NPO", also "non-profit" or "not-for-profit") is a legally constituted organization whose primary objective is to support or to actively engage in activities of public or private interest without any commercial or monetary profit purposes. with the goal of providing laptop computers to all children in developing nations, today announced a breakthrough user interface (UI), called Sugar, for OLPC's innovative XO laptop computer. The Sugar UI, jointly developed with Red Hat and Pentagram, is the first to have been purpose-built as an educational environment for children using laptops. It is designed to support the learning experiences of elementary- and secondary-school children in poor, often rural communities by providing them with opportunities to freely explore, experiment and express themselves. The Sugar UI promotes collaborative learning through child-to-child and child-to-teacher sharing. The realities that OLPC's XO laptops will be used by children of varying ages, nationalities, and who have little or no prior computer experience, were critical considerations when designing the UI. As a result, OLPC created Sugar to be simple and intuitive without limiting the complexity of ideas that children may explore or express. "The desktop metaphor The desktop metaphor is a set of unifying concepts currently used in a number of graphical user interfaces in computer operating systems. The monitor of a computer represents the user's desktop upon which documents and folders of documents can be placed. familiar to most laptop users today may make sense in business settings, but it's not geared for children collaborating with each other and their teachers," said Walter Bender Walter Bender is the president of One Laptop Per Child Software and Content: the organization coordinating and developing software and content for the Children's Machine computer. Between 2000 and 2006, Bender served as the executive director of the MIT Media Lab. , OLPC's president of software and content. "With Sugar, we've created something wholly new and suited to the way children understand and describe their world and relationships. Most importantly Adv. 1. most importantly - above and beyond all other consideration; "above all, you must be independent" above all, most especially , Sugar is easy for children to learn to use, yet it's also rich and capable of fostering unbounded discovery, learning, and exploration." Sugar is modeled after a typical, modern-day operating environment In computing, an operating environment is the environment in which users run programs, whether in a command line interface, such as in MS-DOS or the Unix shell, or in a graphical user interface, such as in the Macintosh operating system. , but with key modifications: Typical < Sugar Desktop < Neighborhood Menu bar < Frame Hierarchical file system < Journal Applications < Activities Files < Objects In Sugar, the interface hosts four discrete views: home, friends, neighborhood and activity. Each of the views relates to a particular goal of the OLPC project and enhances learning by fostering communities and social networking See social networking site. social networking - social network , and by enabling access to large repositories of knowledge such as Web sites, and school or community servers. Surrounding any view is the "Frame", which is comparable to a menu bar on a traditional interface. The frame serves as a connecting point between activities, people, objects and applications. The left, top, and right side of the frame represent people, places and things People, Places and Things is an unpublished collection of short stories by US author Stephen King, written in 1960 together with his friend Chris Chesley and published using their own press. , while the bottom part signifies anything that needs action, such as an invitation or notification. A search bar is located on the top of the frame to search for people, activities, keywords, and tags. Results can be used to send invitations to people to join an activity, group, etc. Once an invitation has been accepted, the child's XO is displayed on the frame. Home - The "home" view is closely equivalent to a modern-day computer desktop. It serves as the starting point Noun 1. starting point - earliest limiting point terminus a quo commencement, get-go, offset, outset, showtime, starting time, beginning, start, kickoff, first - the time at which something is supposed to begin; "they got an early start"; "she knew from the to explore the "mesh network A communications network in which there are at least two pathways to each node. If one of the paths fails, the other is still available. A "fully meshed" network means that every node has a direct connection to every other node, which is a very elaborate and expensive architecture. " - comprising a student and all those around him or her - and personal activities. From here, children can easily manage activities and jump to other views. Friends - In the "friends" view, children can see which of their friends are on the network and in what activities they are participating. Children can also join any of the non-private activities and send invitations to start an activity of their own. Neighborhood - The "neighborhood" view displays everyone in the mesh network, as well as all current activities taking place. It is one of the fundamental areas for exploration and collaboration, as it enables children to freely search the network, interact with each other and engage in varying activities. Activity - This view displays the activities in which all of the actual exploration, collaboration and creation take place. In the "activity" view, applications run full-screen to help the children focus on one specific activity at a time. For more information about the Sugar user interface and OLPC's XO laptop computer, visit http://wiki.laptop.org or email info@laptop.org. About One Laptop per Child One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization created by Nicholas Negroponte and other faculty members from the MIT Media Lab This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications. Alone, primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of this article are not sufficient for an accurate encyclopedia article. to design, manufacture and distribute laptop computers that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to acknowledge and modern forms of education. The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child. These machines will be rugged, open source, and so energy efficient that they can be powered by a child manually. Mesh networking will give many machines Internet access from one connection. The pricing goal will start near $100 and then steadily decrease. |
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