Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 14th May 2008 09:02 UTC
Back in November of 2006, I wrote a piece about the One Laptop Per Child Project. I was afraid that the project's focus on creating a whole new paradigm (the Sugar UI) would ultimately intervene with the actual goal of the project: teaching stuff to kids. Ivan Krstic, former director of security architecture at OLPC, wrote an essay in which he heavily criticises the OLPC project.
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Member since:
2006-02-07
I don't understand why is there such an opposition to sugar. And I don't understand why so many people perceive the project as a failure, especially in a technical site like this.
I'm not a kid, so I won't speak from theory, just from the adult end user experience (not the intended target, but I doubt anyone here has credentials on techno and education either).
Sugar seems to me the perfect UI for the type of physical device it was designed for. Very easy to point, very clean usability concepts. The last joyride builds are simply awesome. Performance lags, and the Journal needs a lot of love, but the concept and even present day usability is great. And the cute programming interface actually reminds me a lot of how I got fascinated with computers when I was a kid.
While I understand the strategic mistake of taking on so many fronts at the same time, I doubt that the goals of the project can be successful without a major rethinking of the interface. The project could benefit from collaboration with Ubuntu Mobile or something like that, but something along those lines would have been needed anyway. A regular desktop OS is not a good fit for this computer, you can install it (pretty easily, I've done that in a few minutes) but the window metaphor has a limit in this type of machine and needs more than just tweaking. The Sugar UI in all its imperfections is still my preferred interface.
And from a kid's perspective it's really easy to install whatever flavor of linux you want in it. In short, let's not forget how great these little machines are, and the technical prowess (both in hardware and software) they achieved, even creating the market for low-cost, tiny laptops. I thought that this is what people in this site would have been more interested about rather than discussing the pitfalls of management a project of this magnitude, and self congratulating for old pretentious prophecies cast with little real knowledge on the subject.