Snowed In

To everyone out there on the various Planets Summer of Code: Hi. I’m Erik Pukinskis, and my project is to redesign the AbiWord user interface to be more appropriate for the OLPC (MIT’s $100 Laptop). My sponsor is the AbiWord project, rather than OLPC or Gnome, but hopefully the other SoCers with those orgs will be interested in what I’m working on. You can read my application for more details.

So, the first thing I need to get a handle on is: who is the OLPC for?

First some basic demographics. The OLPC people recently put up a map that shows which countries they plan to run pilot studies in: Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Egypt, India, China, and Thailand. And according to the OLPC wiki, “There are about 1.2 billion children at the age of 6-15 years and about half of them are potential users of this hardware.”

That’s a little scary to me. Designing for a group of people that spans several continents and ten years of intense developmental changes is not a simple proposition. If you want to do user-centered design, it’s hard to know where to start.

Chris Blizzard has been blogging about the context of use for the OLPC, and says they “have good sense” of what it is. I’m not entirely sure what he means when he says context of use, but I think what he’s saying is that they understand the educational goals of the OLPC pretty well. I’m going to read through Papert’s various writings on the OLPC wiki and hopefully get a better understanding of what those goals are too.

But that’s a little tangential to my original question: who is the OLPC for?

And the answer is: I don’t really know. And I’m not sure who in the OLPC really knows, but I’m going to try to find out.

Thankfully, there is a wealth of ethnographic data out there which has been compiled by professional ethnographers whose job it is to write about the cultures they study and also to write about their own motivations and biases. It’s a fantastic source of data for those of us designing for the OLPC, and it’s there for the taking.

I don’t have a good list of what to read yet, but I’ve got some queries out there, and I’ll post here as soon as I start finding some good ethnographic data about children in the OLPC countries. I did find “Booting Up Amid Flattened Frogs“, an interesting article in Revista, the Harvard Review of Latin America. Edward B. Colby talks about his experiences setting up a computer lab for the kids he was teaching English to in Costa Rica. Costa Rica isn’t an OLPC pilot country, but I imagine Edward’s experiences might have been similar in Brazil or Argentina.

I emailed Edward to find out more about how the kids used the computers, and he sent an interesting reply:

I only taught one period in the computer
lab per week for each grade at my school, and that only in the last
several months of the school year–so mostly I was content to let the kids explore the various audio-visual English-language programs we had (which they really enjoyed), and learn how a computer generally works. (The popular programs included Crayons Paint Studio; a slew of different classic children’s stories like the Rabbit and the Hare; and a construction CD which allowed them to build various structures.)

Partly because my students were much more proficient orally (in both Spanish and English) than with writing, much less time was spent on word processing. However, I remember some days when some kids enjoyed using the encyclopedia Encarta, and if I had had more time, I would have tried to use Encarta and Microsoft Publisher as teaching tools more. [emphasis mine]

That puts this whole AbiWord-on-OLPC project in pretty sharp relief. It means my goal is not just to design a word processor for someone who lives in another country and is using a low-resolution screen. My goal is to design a word processor for someone who hasn’t developed strong written language skills yet.

What might that mean? Maybe it means that AbiWord needs integrated drawing tools to give kids who can’t write a way to get started. Maybe it means we should have text labels on all the clip-art so that kids can make clip-art stories and learn to read at the same time.

In the end, I’m not really sure what it means for AbiWord, but I think this kind of research is what we need to make AbiWord into a really powerful tool for these kids.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Summer of Code, pi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.