Re: [Tuxpaint-devel] [Fwd: [K12OSN] TuxPaint 0.9.16 vs. KidPix a teachers perspective]

[Albert C. <aca...@gm...>]

On 12/16/06, Bill Kendrick <nb...@so...> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 16, 2006 at 02:22:28PM -0500, Albert Cahalan wrote:

> > You can color over it, then write new text.
> >
> > Anything else would be too complicated for the little ones.
>
> It really is one of the #1 requested features, though.  I'm not sure why,
> exactly.  It's always from school settings, of course.

It would be good to find out a lot more about the usage case.
Some random mostly-wrong guesses, one of which may be right:

a. Teachers can not resist correcting bad spelling or math, and
    can not stand to let it be.

b. They really want a story+picture program, half word processor.
    Normal business software handles this by letting users embed
    objects into a word processing document. We can imagine a
    Tux Word program that allows this, possibly even starting up
    Tux Paint when the user clicks on an image.

c. They really want something more like a CAD program.

> > Consider changing the background after something has been drawn.
> > Go from white to black. How????
>
> Wow, I had never considered that.
> Of course, I see it from this standpoint: why would you draw fish on
> a reef, and then suddenly decide you want the skyline behind the fish...?

Maybe the reef's front overlay starts to get in the way. Maybe you
realize that goldfish don't like salt water. Maybe it's the reef that was
forgotten, and you drew the fish on plain white by mistake.

> > I really wonder what these people do.
> >
> > Do they save to floppies? Have they found floppies to be tolerant
> > of being taken to the gym, cafeteria, bus stop, etc.? Do the drives
> > work fine after reading potato chips? When the floppies go bad,
> > do the kids cry?
> >
> > Are the kids running with admin rights? Are they the ones who
> > keep the computers operating?
>
> *shrug*  I really don't understand why people use networked logons and
> then have everyone share.  But, I guess when you're dealing with hundreds
> of Kindergarteners, a population which itself changes year-by-year, if you
> have very little IT support, you don't want to go into the business of
> user account management...?

So what is the expectation? Is it indeed the floppy disk?
It seems they want access control... without doing access control!

Maybe they'd like Tux Paint to use CD-RW media and write
out an index.html file.