Narrative Interfaces —
As Scott’s preview post explained, today was “Narrative Interfaces” day at OLPC — the general motivation for this work is that the current Sugar interface leaves you able to do lots of different activities with your XO laptop, but doesn’t have any strong opinions about which you *should* do, or which order you should do them in. Wouldn’t it be better if we could come up with a plot/narrative behind the activities that can be explored on an XO?
I’ve uploaded videos of the talks now. They are:
- C. Scott Ananian’s talk on the lessons OLPC can learn from Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age.
- Angela Chang’s demo of her system for early literacy work called Tinkerbooks.
- Nick Montfort’s talk introducing his interactive fiction system, Curveship.
- My demo of one possible way to add a GUI on top of Curveship’s world model. (Source is here, and includes pygame code and art from Radomir Dopieralski’s Junk Lab demo.)
In the discussion afterwards we chatted about comics that do a good job of presenting non-fiction, as an alternative way of using narrative to present ideas — here’s our reading list:
- Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
- 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style
- The Cartoon Guide to Physics
- Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays
- A People’s History of American Empire
- Two Fisted Science: Stories About Scientists
- The Cartoon Introduction to Economics: Volume One: Microeconomics
- The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA
- Turtle Geometry: The Computer as a Medium for Exploring Mathematics
- Dignifying Science: Stories About Women Scientists
If you’d prefer to download the videos directly, you can find the raw files here.
Thanks to everyone who participated! If you weren’t able to attend in person but have comments after watching the videos, feel free to jump in with your thoughts on the Sugar Labs IAEP list.
Be sure to add the book “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics)
to your reading list. Not only does he
make a compelling book-length non-fiction tutorial in a comic-book format — but its subject matter is the philosophy and practice of making comics, the very skill you are trying to teach.
And also don’t miss the epic *series* of teaching books by Professor Larry Gonick (who did the Cartoon Guides above). His “The Cartoon History of the Universe”, handles astronomy, physics, evolutionary theory, and history – from the Big Bang to the present day.
Thanks for the comment — I do have copies of those two, but neglected to add them to the list.