Eben, this might be a great opportunity to spend some time with the etoys team working out how you could realize what you have in mind with existing tools. As Alan notes, it is designed to do very much what you are writing about -- as well as doing some excellent sugar & 1200x900 emulation ;-)
I'd like to spend a day this coming week working through Alan's 50-of-100 notes, and the use cases you have in mind. (Alan, can we make the document public?)
As for presentations and slides, Etoys remains for the time being our supported method for importing .ppt -- Rebecca, have you tried this? Were you asking for something more specific?
SJ
ps - That might also be a good opportunity to think about what a generic bundle looks like.
On 6/2/07, Alan Kay alan.kay@squeakland.org wrote:
You might want to check out what Etoys actually does and is. (Hint: it covers your desiderata beIow pretty well.)
I suggest perusing the document that I made up for the OLPC countries meeting a few weeks ago. Nia Lewis will probably have a copy.
Cheers,
Alan
At 07:50 AM 6/2/2007, Eben Eliason wrote:
Ever since this project began, I've had this idea in my head regarding what a "slideshow" might mean on the OLPC machine. I'd really like to see an activity called "Collage" which is something like a modern descendent of Hypercard. It should take the idea of embedding media further, of course allowing images, sounds, video and text, but perhaps also supporting live logo turtles, live editable text boxes and other interactive forms. Ideally, there would be an interface which made it pluggable so that any activity could embed its formats and provide hooks for interacting with it.
Bringing it all together, it should support a basic logo-like scripting language. This could allow simple actions like "next page", but could also be allowed to pull text from the live text boxes via some identifiers, animate the embedded objects, track some basic mouse and keyboard events, and interact with hooks provided by the plugins.
A child could create a single page, or a simple slideshow, but by taking full advantage of the nature of the scripting which pulls things together, they can create non-linear books, interactive animations, science reports with embedded interactive experiments, games, and more.
As fun as this would be for kids, I also see this as being a fantastic format for teachers to create lesson plans in: provide some instructions with text and images, embed a video about the topic, script up a little physics simulation that the kids can experiment with, embed an abiword table widget which automatically records the results of the experiment, and place some questions with textboxes at the end so the kids can answer them and then turn in their "lab." Heck, you could even automatically check the answers when they are done, or interactively assist them when they answer incorrectly, nudging them along or referencing the results table again.
- Eben
On 6/2/07, Rebecca Gettys rebecca.gettys@comcast.net wrote:
Hi All, I think that sideshows CAN be very sueful in the class room, and they have actually taught be to pay attention to detail. You need notes to do anything really, and they do have their applications with other students. Just a thought. ~Rebecca _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
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Eben (and others), what you're discussing sounds like it has some concept in common with the Flatland proposal I posted on the wiki and mentioned on the sugar list about two months ago:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Flatland
I encourage you all to read that page, and I hope some of those ideas are interesting and helpful to you.
-- Ping
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