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Stuart Garfield
Designing laptops for kids
Two local nonprofits with roots at the MIT Media Lab — Sugar Labs Foundation and the International Children’s Digital Library — are designing kid-friendly user interfaces, continuing efforts to boost education in developing nations.
Two weeks ago, ex-Media Lab director and ex-One Laptop Per Child President Walter Bender announced his new Cambridge-based venture, Sugar Labs, which will continue developing the open-source Sugar user interface Bender developed for OLPC’s XO laptop.
With OLPC announcing earlier this month that it would embrace Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP operating system, Bender’s Sugar will be made available for other low-cost laptops, including ASUSTek Computer Inc.’s Eee.
Bender made simplicity key to the design of Sugar but said he wanted to make sure children could use the interface as a “springboard to complexity.” Sugar, which Bender said took two years to develop, is intended to limit the user to a single focus at a time, with no overlapping windows for multitasking. Sugar also eliminates a computing tradition Bender called clumsy and difficult: double clicking.
“It’s an artifact that’s just not necessary,” Bender said.
Another key to designing a user interface for children was to make everything in the laptop “discoverable.” To that end, informational hover menus pop up over anything the cursor is held over. Bender said increasing Sugar’s discoverability was a near-term goal.
“It’s got a ways to go, but it’s getting there,” Bender said. “Kids are using it and they’re learning.”
Sugar Labs is working on a refresh of the Sugar interface, called version .82. New features will include changes to the interface’s journal function, making it more robust and scalable, as well as easier to use, Bender said.
Designing the interface to be free and open-source created an important stream of feedback and criticism, Bender said. “When you do it yourself, you have complete control to make all the mistakes,” he said.
While Sugar involved the open-source community, the International Children’s Digital Library, which digitizes children’s books, enlisted children to help design and test its product, according to Executive Director Tim Brown, who managed corporate research at the Media Lab in the 1980s. Earlier this year, Brown told Mass High Tech that the Manchester-by-the-Sea-based nonprofit library built its search engine to respond to criteria children find important.
“No matter how long you sit with adults, you would not have figured out that kids select books first by color, then by monster,” Brown said.
Mary Mindess, a professor of early childhood education at Lesley College, said it is crucial to design such technology so that children have a degree of control. “Children learn better when they can make the decisions, rather than a tutorial,” Mindess said.
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