Design for Isolated and Inexperienced user base

[Susan Addington]

On Mar 16, 2006, at 10:42 AM, Jonathan D. Proulx wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 08:07:00PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:
>
> There's no sponsor mandate, except I suppose that they be used for
> educational purposed in the schools, which is pretty broad.
>
> I'm speculating two broad classes of use.  First the teacher in
> preparing lessons and other school management.  For this desktop I've
> listed the productivity tools.  For the student use (age about 6-12)
> I'd expect gcompris, tuxmath, a typing tutor, tux paint, and and
> editor probably openoffice write.
>
> Do you think more of the productivity suit would be used by the
> students?  I do have 7 and 10yr old testers at home but they learned
> to type before they learned to write so a bit of a different
> demographic.

Software:
For middle grades math (ages 10 and up) the spreadsheet can be very  
valuable for making the transition from arithmetic to algebra. (This  
isn't very well known, but I'm working on it.) And a dynamic geometry  
program: I think that GeoGebra does the best job of any software,  
even commercial ones, for connecting geometry and algebra. Apparently  
java needs to be installed separately (from what I have heard from  
this list.) The drawing programs are also good for various things in  
math.

But, again, it's hard to say without knowing the people. Do they have  
lots of paper and pencil? Slates and chalk? Pocket calculators?  I  
notice that 95% of the adult population is literate (according to the  
CIA website.)

Susan Addington
saddingt at csusb.edu, susan.addington at earthlink.net
Math Department, California State University, San Bernardino

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