Retraining robots

Hi All,

We ran a session last week that involved kids retraining a robot. The
session actually went quite well, but highlighted what I think are a
couple of UI problems with robot retraining:

1). Once you have sucked out the input box from a robot's thought bubble
there is no visual difference between an untrained robot, and one that
is ready to be retrained.
2). Kids wanted to add some robot actions to the end of a sequence of
actions. It was quite common for them to move the mouse (or maybe press
a key) almost straight away after entering retraining, thereby taking
over control and stopping the previous actions that they really wanted
to happen. When retraining it is far to easy to accidentally do this, as
there is no visual indication that (a) the robot is replaying the
actions he was previously taught and (b) if you move the mouse (or press
a key) you will take over control of the training.

For problem 1, you could possibly have a greyed out input box left in
the thought bubble after sucking out the real one (this greyed one
wouldn't be a real object that could be manipulated). This would show
what type of box the robot was trained with and distinguish it from an
untrained one.

I think 2 is the more serious problem. One solution would be to use the
Time Travel metaphor when entering robot retraining. When you enter, the
robot is playing back what it was trained to do, and in order to take
over control you need to hit record. Don't know if this can work in the
same way as the 'real' existing time travel. E.g. what happens if the
user really wants to time travel while already in 'retraining' replay
mode? E.g. what happens if the user doesn't have time travel enabled? 


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W e b L a b s   R e s e a r c h e r
I n s t i t u t e   o f   E d u c a t i o n
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