Kiddix:
First up is the Kiddix operating system, from what I can tell, this basically a modified KDE environment made by a company in the US. The bad thing about this is that it costs $75 in spite of being built mostly upon GPL software. This means I can't exactly try it out, another issue is that there isn't exactly a huge amount of information on it. But still, it's useful to know of it's existance, I could possibly even try emailing them to find out more.
Debian Jr.:
There really isn't so much to say about this right now since what I really need to do is download the test live CD and give it a whirl. From the looks of things this isn't being actively developed anymore since the last news entry was towards the end of 2003
Edubuntu:
I don't know why this thought didn't occur to me before. While searching I came across this article which opened my eyes to this option. I always thought it was for older kids. I'll need to find out what it's goals are and try it out on one of my machines.
Research:
So far I have found that I'm not the first person to have this idea for a project, however the project paper [*.pdf link] I have found is using ideas completely different to my own. Can use this in my literature review?
This article contains useful information about Interface design for children.
Here is an interesting part of an interview with Dr. Madelon Evers, Managing Producer at Human Shareware.
Kevin:
What differences are there between your design for childrenand your design for an adult audience?Madelon:
In general children are much more critical --
They have no patience.
They click before they listen and often (especially boys, we've noticed) need to come back to something a number of times before they really get it, not because they are unintelligent but because they are trigger happy.
They don't read (not counting if they are too young to read).
They want clear responses and intelligent systems.
They need a lot of feedback and like to have a lot of interesting instruction and encouragement when there is a learning challenge.
They need reinforcement of their experience on the computer in the classroom or outside / beyond the computer; we make this a central part of the concepts we create since it also keeps the teachers happy!
Kids never ask why do I need this programme; adults are much more sceptical.
The computer is a huge motivator for kids; our work with dyslexic kids showed they solved alot of learning and concentration problems through the computer simply because the dynamic is different and the computer is patient with them, day in day out.
Full interview here.
This link will be useful for ideas for software to include in my repackaged distro.
The layout requirements in this *.pdf [*.pdf link] Could be extremely useful. This paper is about the same project.
This article is very interesting [*.pdf link] but I am not sure if it is relevant.
This blog post has a video which shows how the Sugar UI works and an interesting post to go with it. Although the Sugar UI is represented with a "Mac OSX" style, this is how the Sugar UI is used. Really, I'm still torn between trying to use Sugar for this project, or modifying gnome. More info on Sugar here.
A note on using gnome, Glade could be useful for developing interfaces to control shell scripts.
