PUBLIC MARKS from sbrothier with tags enfants & interface

Every second child between the ages of five and six has a very special playmate: a computer. Computer software manufacturers and providers for kids' websites make sure that their products are educational. At the same time, optimal usability should not be neglected, as kids do not only have a mind of their own, but also specific needs and requirements of an interactive system. In a study, User Interface Design GmbH (UID) now defines rules for usability engineering for and with kids.

The goal of OLPC is to provide children with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves. Many children in need of such opportunities have previously had little or no access to computing, and so will be unfamiliar with the laptop and how to interact with it. This will undoubtedly have effects on some aspects of activity development. On the one hand, it means that developers must focus energy into making interfaces discoverable, wholly intuitive, and building metaphors that strengthen and clarify the interface. On the other hand, since the laptop will be the first experience of computing for many children, activities do not have to be overly true to legacy behaviors or expectations. This frees developers to innovate.

The Sugar software is evolving rapidly, so there are different instructions, depending which version you have. The OLPC software comes in "builds", which are loaded into the laptop's firmware (or booted from a CD image, USB key, or SD card). This page documents the Sugar version in the current stable build (Build 385). You can find all versions of this documentation in [

I've largely been ignoring Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative. I appreciate the nobility of the gesture, but how interesting can sub-$100 hardware running Linux really be? Well, that was before I read about the novel user interface they're building into those small green and white laptops.

Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Takaaki Okada are working on the design of the laptop interface for the One Laptop Per Child project, the initiative to put $100 laptops in the hands of children around the world. The project is being led by Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the MIT Media Lab, and the designers are working in close collaboration with the OLPC development team, including president Walter Bender and designer Eben Eliason. Production on the laptops is scheduled for mid-2007.