squeakland Blog from October, 2009

Randy, Avigail, Cathie, Cherry, Christine, Hilaire, Rita

We started discussing two questions Avigail raised in an email, which are now related to tracker issues.
1. How to edit/change a project that is already in the showcase? Find more details and comments in the tracker here:

http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ-534
2. How to choose appropriate age recommendation for projects? As it turns out, the current items to choose from (up to 8 years, 9-11, 12-14, 15 and older) are very hard to use. Especially the upper limit can descourage older kids to even try the project. And when choosing the target age for projects, it is ok to choose the minimal age, but often the upper limit is not appropriate. Since we want to have target age for the projects in featured showcase, the options should be changed. The result of our discussion is this:

• ages 8 - older

• ages 12 - older

• ages 15 - older

• 18+

Here is the related tracker issue:

http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ-533

Related to that we think that every project in featured showcase should have target age. We have to find out if it is possible somehow to add categorization to projects which are already uploaded. If this is impossible, we will at least add the relevant information using comments.
Featured projects should cover all age groups from elementary school to college level.
Since it seems to be hard to add target age later, we talked about how to encourage people, and especially kids, to choose a target age for their projects (withour pressing them to do so). Cathie came up with a nice text:

If you would like to share your project with the most people possible, please indicate what age person might be most interested in looking at or using your project.
3. We discussed which projects should be featured for the new release. Currently on our list are:

• all projects from the gallery, which are not in the tutorials section on the website:
  salmon sniff
  fish and plankton
  simple springs
  lunar lander game
  ball drop analysis
  bouncing ball animation
  make a movie
  speed acceleration
  random racing
  computer logic game
  turtle geometry

• other projects to feature:
  rabbits and grass
  butterfly queen
  seymour quest
  sun earth moon
  add relative integer
  Pling
  Ant Colony
  Morphing
  Spirograph
  nBody

Every project should have a description what it is about, especially projects like butterfly queen (story telling), which is the winenr of the waveplace awards. We also discussed if we should add more information about the developer of the project, like age and gender, to encourage and motivate other kids, but we should probably not publish such information about younger children, so we will not do this.

4. During our discussion about target age we again hit the point of having two different kind of projects: projects which are "just for fun" and projects with a sopecial purpose and how to distinguish between these.

5. Courseware
We are working on short descriptions for the courseware units.
We discussed examples of how the startpage for the courseware could look like. The design of the page is important also from an educational point of view. Avigail suggested to look up other education websites. Randy suggested to use a circle and put the categories around it, with arrows showing the relations between the topics. In the middle we can write up the main ideas of Etoys.
We looked up some examplary websites:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5sNE5ktPHQ4/Rrz-RLNHnFI/AAAAAAAAACc/WOHdV-NoUXU/s320/matrix.jpg
http://studentaffairs.uoregon.edu/planning/images/curriculum1.png
http://www.cast.uark.edu/assets/images/Research/Geomatics/geomatics.jpg
http://ceep.crc.uiuc.edu/pubs/katzsym/dodge2.gif

The second link was best appreciated. Cherry will make a first draft based on the example, using our list of units.
6. Cherry told us that John Stout is asking for help using the mesh network with Etoys. Rita advised that he should ask his questions on the squeakland mailing list.

Cathleen Galas, Christine Murakami, Cherry Withers, Randy Caton, John Stout, Tim Falconer, Rita Freudenberg

We started discussing the misison and role of the education team.  Tim copied parts of his document:
The education director will manage a team of "ambassadors" ... people who represent Etoys in their local region, encourage content creation, and promote training workshops.
He mentioned that the ed team mission has expanded. Rita's position (from invitation email): Are we primarily developers of content and documentation? Are we mentors for Etoys users? Are we supporters for whatever need arises in the community regarding use of Etoys in the classroom or at home? What is most important?When we agree on our role, we also need some rules for processes. For instance, what happens when the education team makes a decision which effects the software, website etc.? If another team needs a decision, do they have to write a proposal for us to decide? I personally prefer as few rules as possible, we all are volunteers and I believe that this kind of project can only be done in a starfish organisation [*] .
Randy pointed out that interaction with the software team is very important. Cathie made a point that not every changes someone would like to have should go into the system. It is important not to disrupt the user experience. We agreed that the education team should balance the need for changes and the responsibility for user experience. Tim said, that changes only go into the software, if all teams agree. Education team are the "stakeholders" and decide which change requests to consider.

Cathie said: 
I believe that the ed team should include both pieces for formal and informal learning environments.  This would include giving teachers use tips for classrooms, and looking at content creation for formal learning, which is different from working with kids that find the site on their own and need mentoring individually. balance is important-and then the changes might only be made once in a while-at certain points in time that are pre-ordained? 

Randy:
The education team should serve as a moderator for changes to Etoys and examine or suggest changes from an educational standpoint after careful deliberation and suggest associated documentation. I also believe that the education team should have input on the decision to add items to the featured showcase. The education team should be involved in planning Squeakfest as we have been.

Rita:
The education team will decide what goes to the fetaured showcase.
Tim told us about Squeakfest planning, announcement will coming soon. Also, we will add links to USEit project and Project Ceibal to the website.

Cathie: 
Tim-are you going to be posting the Wilmington projects to the Community page? I wonder if there should be something on the site also referencing the OLPC project and noting that EToys is part of the package.

We discussed what has to be done regarding courseware. SQ82. Tim sets the goal for the courseware to "training wheels to get them to "i can do anything!" lightbulb".

Cathie pointed out one of her articles on the old Squeakland website:

This article that I wrote in 2001 also talks about projects and gives ideas for teachers to use the tool in the classroom. http://www.squeakland.org/resources/articles/article.jsp?id=1012 Maybe this could be posted to the education section for teachers?

Tim:
what i need in two weeks: 16 titles, 16 paragraphs, specifically ... picking topics that could be taught in 2 weeks for a 4th grade teacher
3 for math, 3 for language arts, 3 for science, 3 for social studies, 1 for visual arts, 1 for music, 1 for health
Cathie: outline of topics that a fourth grade teacher would recognize.
Cathie said, that we need a guide for teachers how to do projects (not Etoys projects) in the classroom and how they can include Etoys animations/simulations.
Randy:
I agree with what Cathie says and that is where my heart lies. I think it would be good to look at something concrete to develop guidelines for the courseware.
Rita: randy, that's why I want to develop one unit, we can discuss what kind of projects we will use by doing this one unit
Cathie lists skilld which can be learned with the courseware: learner engages in scientifically oriented questions, learner gives priority to evidence in responding to questions, learner formulates explanations from evidence, learner connects explanations to scientific knowledge, learner communicates and justifies explanations,
Tim--look at the above article to take to principals also: http://www.squeakland.org/resources/articles/article.jsp?id=1012 fourth grade math core standards http://www.uen.org/cc/uen/core/pub/displayCoreCourse.action?ccId=5040

Randy:
Etoys is a revolutionary computer-based learning environment that works well with the Universal Design for Learning approach and can be used to support the three recommendations of the How People Learn study. It is important to integrate mathematics into the development of science concepts to allow the levels of mathematical, conceptual, and science reasoning to rise together. This integration leads to a spiral process of understanding science through mathematics and building conceptual knowledge. The Etoys environment allows learners to use mathematics in simulations of science concepts. The ability of students to author their own projects or build on projects created by others supports an authentic approach to learning provides near instantaneous feedback to students while they are authoring. These features open the door for students to learn like experts learn.

We had a look at the old drive-a-car tutorial, which is on the old website: http://squeakland.org/content/oldsite/. Tim suggested to have an courseware unit with drive-a-car. Rita suggested to use it for the basic unit, where beginners learn about Etoys. Randy advised to especially highlight the philosophy behind the tutorial, which is described by Alan Kay. Rita will redo the drive-a-car for the courseware.

Tim will prepare a webpage for the curriculum, which should be the page where new users will linked to. The education team has time to work on this page, it's contents and look before it will be public. Tim wants to have the description for the courseware by October, 22. Randy prepares the units for math&science (he did that alerady), Cherry will do social studies, Tim will do language arts and music.

At the end of the meeting Tim told us about his idea to send out emails to the whole community and asking them to click a link and put their names on the website. The goal is to get to know, how many people actually read the mails on the mailing list.

Kathleen, Avigail, Randy, Cherry, Bert, Tim, Rita

1. Release notes

The release notes for the new Etoys version have to be written. There is a list of what has changed in the new version: http://etoys.laptop.org/src/ChangeLog

And then there are some other changes (like added languages ec.) which is here:

http://etoys.laptop.org/src/NEWS

http://svn.squeakland.org/installers/NEWS

Our task as the education team would be to tell the users what has changed in the new version, but in a way they can understand it. This is what Kim wrote for the last Etoys version:

http://squeakland.org/download/releaseNotes.jsp

Rita will go through the list and write up a first version.

2. Showcase

The second part of the meeting was devoted to discussions about the showcase.

Randy suggested to have an explanation on the top of the screen about how to vote and to have a submit-button on the page. Tim pointed out that this is related Issue SQ-472 in the tracker.

http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ-472

Cherry asked, if there will be a button to enable or disable ranking.

We then had a longer discussion about if we want to rank projects or not. Kathleen and Avigail are strongly against ranking (mostly because they don't want to discourage children, and it is very difficult to rank a project from a child and a project from an expert because these cannot be compared to eachother), Randy, Cherry, Bert and Tim are in favour of it (feedback will help children to learn more, ranking will help users to find good projects easily). Rita would like to not have every project ranked.

Tim pointed out four points without consensus yet:

1) whether the "featured" and "everyone" sections should have different names, different looks, different rules, and different navigation

2) whether "everyone" projects should be ranked at all

Kathleen wrote an email where she explained the reasons why ranking projects could be dangerous. Rita pointed out that submitters should decide if they want their projects ranked to lessen the burden of the rankers.

3) whether moderation (hiding a project due to inappropriate content) should be separate from ranking (giving points to projects to allow sorting)

Tim asked, if just moderating really could be faster then ranking.

4) whether to show account levels with colored dots, and if so, how to calculate them

We didn't get to this point in the meeting.

Regarding #1:

Randy suggested to follow Kim's idea of having the best projects with proper guidance and explanation in the featured section.

The teams agrees on that.

There is no consensus yet about the other projects. Should they be ranked, and how? There was a lot of discussion.

Tim explained that there will be groups, where all members of the group could put projects without any ranking (good for use in classrooms).

We discussed about approving/unapproving projects some more. A suggestion was to rank with negative numbers could mean rejection. Bert strongly recommended not to mingle moderation and ranking, which would happen because these negative numbers would be used when calculating the rank. Tim agreed to put a veto-button in the ballots, which is used to reject projects, so that no other person has to look at that project.

We agreed on this process:

• when a project is uploaded, ballots are being send
• in the ballots you find a veto-button to reject projects with inappropriate content (we will write down what is considered inappropriate).
• The person, who rejects a project, has to write a comment why it has been rejected.
• The project will be send back to the submitter, who will read the comment and a nice email that he/she please should change the project and upload it again
• if the project is uploaded again, a new ballot for this project will be generated, so that not necessarily the same person will look at that project (but of course that can happen)

To make ranking easier, Randy will write up a list of labels which can be used instead of just numbers.

This last point is crucial and needs a bit more detail. Tim wanted to unify grading with moderation, so points were given from -10 to 10, and an overall negative score means the project gets rejected. The group said that rejection should be either-or, so another idea thrown into the mix was to rate from -1 to 10, where -1 would mean reject, and the non-negatives a rating. But even assigning points merely on a 0 to 10 scale was deemed difficult (5 should mean "average"). So Randy brought up the idea to do away with the numbers and rather have "rubrics", that is textual labels to choose from. And not surprisingly he was tasked with creating the list

Three points further points that were made . . .

1) if we don't rank projects at all in "everyone", how will users find good projects when there are thousands of projects in "everyone". Both Cherry and Randy made points in favor of ranking within everyone ... Cherry, "I don't want to have to click on each of the 100 "geometry" projects to find one I like. Randy, "It'll make it easier for the ed team to pick projects to feature."

2) if we allow users to choose not to be ranked, what rank will we give them? Without a rank, they have a rank of zero unless we choose something else. In a list of 1000 projects, 900 of which are ranked and 100 that are not, where do the 100 get put? If the bottom, is this fair to the 100? If somewhere else, is this fair to the 900?

3) ranking is invisible to the project author. Yes, ranks control where in the various lists a project will appear (overall rank, subject rank, target age rank, region rank, tag rank). But these will be completely different. There is no obvious score apparent to any child or adult. Tim believes people are missing this point as they object to ranking, either in part or in whole.

<!-- @page

P

-><!- @page

P

-->
Kathleen, Randy, Cherry, Bert, Tim, Rita

1. Release notes

The release notes for the new Etoys version have to be written. There is a list of what has changed in the new version: http://etoys.laptop.org/src/ChangeLog

And then there are some other changes (like added languages ec.) which is here:

http://etoys.laptop.org/src/NEWS

http://svn.squeakland.org/installers/NEWS

Our task as the education team would be to tell the users what has changed in the new version, but in a way they can understand it. This is what Kim wrote for the last Etoys version:

http://squeakland.org/download/releaseNotes.jsp

Rita will go through the list and write up a first version.

2. Showcase

The second part of the meeting was devoted to discussions about the showcase.

Randy suggested to have an explanation on the top of the screen about how to vote and to have a submit-button on the page. Tim pointed out that this is related Issue SQ-472 in the tracker.

http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ-472

Cherry asked, if there will be a button to enable or disable ranking.

We then had a longer discussion about if we want to rank projects or not. Kathleen and Avigail are strongly against ranking (mostly because they don't want to discourage children, and it is very difficult to rank a project from a child and a project from an expert because these cannot be compared to eachother), Randy, Cherry and Tim are in favour of it (feedback will help children to learn more, ranking will help users to find good projects easily), Rita and Bert would like to have it different from how it is now (especially split the process of ranking into moderating and rating).

Tim pointed out four points without consensus yet:

1) whether the "featured" and "everyone" sections should have different names, different looks, different rules, and different navigation

2) whether "everyone" projects should be ranked at all

Kathleen wrote an email where she explained the reasons why ranking projects could be dangerous. Rita pointed out that submitters should decide if they want their projects ranked to lessen the burden of the rankers.

3) whether moderation (hiding a project due to inappropriate content) should be separate from ranking (giving points to projects to allow sorting)

Tim asked, if just moderating really could be faster then ranking.

4) whether to show account levels with colored dots, and if so, how to calculate them

We didn't get to this point in the meeting.

Regarding #1:

Randy suggested to follow Kim's idea of having the best projects with proper guidance and explanation in the featured section.

The teams agrees on that.

There is no consensus yet about the other projects. Should they be ranked, and how? There was a lot of discussion.

Tim explained that there will be groups, where all members of the group could put projects without any ranking (good for use in classrooms).

We discussed about approving/unapproving projects some more. A suggestion was to rank with negative numbers could mean rejection. Bert strongly recommended not to mingle moderation and ranking, which would happen because these negative numbers would be used when calculating the rank. Tim agreed to put a veto-button in the ballots, which is used to reject projects, so that no other person has to look at that project.

We agreed on this process:

• when a project is uploaded, ballots are being send
• in the ballots you find a veto-button to reject projects with inappropriate content (we will write down what is considered inappropriate).
• The person, who rejects a project, has to write a comment why it has been rejected.
• The project will be send back to the submitter, who will read the comment and a nice email that he/she please should change the project and upload it again
• if the project is uploaded again, a new ballot for this project will be generated, so that not necessarily the same person will look at that project (but of course that can happen)

To make ranking easier, Randy will write up a list of labels which can be used instead of just numbers.