Suggestions for a Bachelor Thesis Project!

[KingYaba]

I want:
[IMG]
j/k

I was going to mention Bonzi Buddy but I guess Clippy is better.

[alex2399]

What did you have in mind for the format? Video, text, game or something else?

Ideally within the interface itself, highlighting the first button click, an abstract animation of how to use the mouse. A full screen to test it out on (with feedback on buttons pressed and movement) where one can do nothing wrong (important for persons with computer anxiety) and some simple tasks. Selecting icons, text, copy-pasta, the basics essentially. Might also be good to show what the different buttons on the keyboard do (Shift=uppercase, CTRL, ALT, Enter, Backspace, essentially any button that hasn't got a normal char on it) since a lot of people don't know.

Then you might go to starting, minimizing, closing, windows. Keep in mind just a window with an example text in, not a full fledged program (=distracting, cluttering and intimidating).

Then you may go to the controls of the user interface (task bars, status bars, things that are common)

When they have mastered the basics, starting a program like Gedit and typing text or Libreoffice Writer with a minimal interface. After that perhaps you may go on to internet browsers, but they would need a training completely on their own because these are pretty complex things, explaining the basics of the internet with concrete examples and on how to use it.

Also don't forget adding something playfull, like changing themes and making clear it only affects the appearance, or a small game in between like tetris and how to control it with the arrow keys.

This is not a roadmap, just to give you a line of thought when specializing on a certain group of human users. Keep it simple, not stupid. Most people aren't stupid, but they are put-off by stupid designs.
That is where your project comes into play in avoiding this and giving a human the mental "tools" to overcome these design problems.
Progress in complexity as the human operating the machine learns and gains more complex concepts of computer/technology use.

[Aerivan]

Ideally within the interface itself, highlighting the first button click, an abstract animation of how to use the mouse. A full screen to test it out on (with feedback on buttons pressed and movement) where one can do nothing wrong (important for persons with computer anxiety) and some simple tasks. Selecting icons, text, copy-pasta, the basics essentially. Might also be good to show what the different buttons on the keyboard do (Shift=uppercase, CTRL, ALT, Enter, Backspace, essentially any button that hasn't got a normal char on it) since a lot of people don't know.

Then you might go to starting, minimizing, closing, windows. Keep in mind just a window with an example text in, not a full fledged program (=distracting, cluttering and intimidating).

Then you may go to the controls of the user interface (task bars, status bars, things that are common)

When they have mastered the basics, starting a program like Gedit and typing text or Libreoffice Writer with a minimal interface. After that perhaps you may go on to internet browsers, but they would need a training completely on their own because these are pretty complex things, explaining the basics of the internet with concrete examples and on how to use it.

Also don't forget adding something playfull, like changing themes and making clear it only affects the appearance, or a small game in between like tetris and how to control it with the arrow keys.

This is not a roadmap, just to give you a line of thought when specializing on a certain group of human users. Keep it simple, not stupid. Most people aren't stupid, but they are put-off by stupid designs.
That is where your project comes into play in avoiding this and giving a human the mental "tools" to overcome these design problems.
Progress in complexity as the human operating the machine learns and gains more complex concepts of computer/technology use.

It's quite an interesting idea! I won't have to decide until autumn but I'll definately take this into consideration. In the mean time, it wwould be nice to have as many different ideas as possible.

[sanderd17]

Maybe something personal and I don't know if it could be done in 16 months.

But I've been searching for a FOSS off-line navigation program for android quite a while. I had found Navit (http://www.navit-project.org/), but Navit is written in C and has almost no libraries on which it depends. As such, it creates real problems with android (in memory usage, GUI and other things) I have tried to help a bit with coding, but I don't know enough C and the accessing from Java to C was just wrong.

In my quest for navigation programs, I also came along Monav (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/MoNav) but that seems to be not availiable for Android and I also saw travelling salesman (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Traveling_salesman) which is a Java library with a PC frontend. But the fact that it's Java could maybe make it easy to write a GUI for (but you would still have problems with memory and so).

For the maps, you could in any case use OpenStreetMap (wikipedia for maps), and if you have questions about OpenStreetMap, ask them. I'm one of the volunteer mappers.

I don't know if this is a good idea to do a bachelor project about, it seems also difficult if you don't have an Android phone yourself (although the emulator is good, it's not real-life). But as I said, it's a bit of a personal frustration.