Testing the OLPC Drawing Activity: An Usability Report

Recently, low cost mobile platforms specially developed for basic education have appeared on the market. The OLPC (one laptop per child) XO laptop, the Intel Classmate and the Encore Mobilis are examples of these new equipments. In the near future, these platforms could be distributed to public schools, enabling mobile learning and one-to-one computing environments in emerging school communities. Mobile learning focuses on learning across spaces, across contexts and learning with mobile devices. We have developed the Oficina software; a drawing activity developed to run on XOs educational laptops and is part of the XO distribution.We believe that usability tests are an essential step in the development of a software application and we have conducted such tests for the Oficina software. The work presents the description and some conclusions of the test we applied to children between 12 to 16 years old to verify easiness of its use.