1/3: One of the paint programs supports drawing with two fingers at a time, but only with one color at a time. Quite reasonably, Jack found this confusing. If you start by drawing with your right pointer with blue, why shouldn't you be able to "dip" your left pointer in the red and have it and only it start to be red? Like so many of kids' "simple" confusions, this brings up many not-so-simple questions for kids of all ages to grapple with.
Do computer interfaces that use physical analogies always set themselves up for failures like this one? Does the problem actually get worse as the interface gets closer to reality? E.g. wasn't this problem caused by touch and/or multi-touch? E.g. how would you expect to draw with two colors at once if you only have one mouse? With the different buttons of that mouse?
Could the program support the feature Jack desired? How?
2/3: Jack "went back for more paint" in one of the paint programs. I.e. after a little while he went back and touched the same color he was already using. Is it a bug or a feature that this is not necessary? Is it a bug or a feature that it was not clear that it was not necessary? Again, would he think he needed to "go back for more" with a mouse?
3/3: Yesterday I left a bag of crayons out in the sun and some of them melted. It created some neat (well, messy) gooey waxy stuff to play with, which slowly turned hard again when I moved an umbrella to put it in the shade. I would be very surprised if a program would use temperature or light sensors to simulate this behavior, and would be even more surprised if it could do a good job of it. Below is part of the result. Quite expressive, in my opinion.
No comments:
Post a Comment