Sugar running on Ndiyo
Ndiyo aren’t the only people trying to open up access to IT to places where people cannot easily afford it currently. One such project that’s been getting a lot of attention recently is the One Laptop Per Child project. Their aim is to help educate children in the developing world by making an affordable low power laptop. Although the hardware gets a lot of focus, they’re also developing a new software environment called SUGAR tailored for learning. SUGAR provides a very minimal environment that allows users easy and unobstructed access to the programs they want and has built in collaborative features. If successful, SUGAR would be a good way for very young children to use computers without having to learn the cumbersome user interface found on computers today.
Here at Ndiyo we thought it would be nice to see the SUGAR software running on a Nivo terminal. A classroom with a single PC and many Nivo terminals could prove easy access to the SUGAR learning environment. Getting the SUGAR system up and running was quite easy, and the result can be seen below:
March 22nd, 2007 at 4:44 pm
The typical way we control computing resources, for adults, is through authentication. Username/password credentials, biometrics, smart cards, etc., etc. and all the baggage that comes with all that. What might be an acceptable authentication method for very young children? Might a very open system (pick your name from a list type) be an interesting learning experience in trust (your peers may impersonate you simply by “logging in” under your name)? Perhaps I’m over-thinking a non-problem and multi-user access for such use cases doesn’t necessarily imply separate accounts and thus authentication. Obviously I’m underlining my lack of knowledge about how SUGAR operates.
March 23rd, 2007 at 10:34 am
It’s an interesting point actually. SUGAR seems to be developed with the idea that a child will log in once and that’s it - which is fine when you have one user per terminal, as I imagine is the usage model for the OLPC project - your authentication token is the laptop! Under a system like ours I suspect you’d have to “log in” every time, and something simpler is presumably the way to go, and like you say, trust is probably easier to instill at an earlier age.
March 29th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
When I first used computer labs, including those I used at Rice University in the lat 90’s, there were for a long time no users on the public machines; if you stored data on the machine, anyone else who came to it could see and use the same files you were using. This was fine; and the lab administrators regularly cleaned up the machines to get rid of old files. I don’t see this as a major element of ‘trust’ — rather, we are used to having ‘personal, private’ environments even when we have no personal data to protect.
Authentication for a given application could be by name…
March 30th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
My 4-year old son is able to type in non-random strings of characters he knows about, so after picking his name from a list it would be no major problem to type in a password. The password should be visible, though, not masked by asterisks in order to provide immediate feedback to the kid.
Then it’s a matter of teaching him not to enter the password when somebody else is watching the screen along with him.
April 20th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Glad to see continued updates on Ndiyo, any ideas as to when we might be able to get our hands on some of this to give it a run?
May 14th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Hi Quentim
News about ndiyo projects ? I know the product and use ( we sell in Brazil ultra thin client), we know MCT from tw, but I like more news about your project…
tks
Nelson