Re: [kidsUI] Pause and restart

[Terry Hancock <hancock@earthlink.net>]

Did my graphic for the "scroll bar" come through?

I sent a PNG, but it looked a little strange in
Netscape (for some reason Netscape seems to have
trouble with PNG).  I could attach GIF, but I
don't want to hog bandwidth by resending stuff
all the time.  I suppose I could carve out a 
piece of my webspace for this sort
of stuff (as I recall it was only 2 or 3 Kb).
I made it using 'display' (ImageMagick), so
I recommend that for viewing.

Doug Loss wrote:
> 
> It's been quiet on the kidsui mailing list for a while now.  I'll assume
> that was because everyone's attention was directed toward Easter and
> other things (mine was), but I think we ought to try to get back to our
> discussions and see if we can continue to make useful progress.
> 
> We left off with Alfredo's Tcl mockup of a storybook generator on the
> table.  We had been talking about ways of changing pages and of saving
> and loading books that would seem "natural" to kids.  I think these
> ideas could generally be considered as a sort of mapping from methods of
> doing similar things in the real world to cognates in our UI.  If you'd
> like to refresh your memory of the discussion, it's archived at
> <http://www.seul.org/archives/kidsui/>

I would like to reemphasize that kids are actually very flexible about
what they can learn on the computer. "Cognates" are mainly of use to
people already proficient in a language.  When you're learning from
scratch it doesn't really matter that much.

I think what is most important for kids is that the symbols for doing
different things are clearly identifiable as symbols, and distinct
from each other, the real explanation of what they do will become
clear from use -- I mean the disk drive will never act _exactly_
like a bookcase, and there may be simple things you want to do that
have no "real world" analog, but that doesn't mean you can't do them.

I'm starting to digress, so I'd better stop. :)

-- 
Terry Hancock
hancock@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~hancock/index.html