education team meeting, October, 22
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.