education team meeting February, 18
Kathleen, Cathie, Avigail, Randy, Stephen, Cherry, Christine, Rita
Rita gave a short summary of her talk with Tim from Wednesday, Feb 17:
- Tim recently conducted together with others two pilots in Cambridge, MA
- Tim started a new outline for the Etoys Basic lessons on the wiki, according to his experiences in the pilots and regarding to the upcoming Haiti pilot
In the discussion was said, that the education will review Tim's lessons and decide, if these will work for the Squeakland courseware. The education team recommends not to neglect the other existing lesson plans and incorporate them in the new courseware. From the next week we will focus more strongly on courseware.
We talked about current state of the manual: we will have the first chapters for review next week! Randy recommended to start the review process, even if the chapters are not in the perfect shape, because it is not sure yet how the review process will work. So we will develop the process by doing the first reviews.
The next point was the introductory text on the squeakland website. The educaiton team feels stronlgy that these texts need improvement. Cathie already rewrote the first paragrah, we want establish a way on how to get changes on the website.
http://www.squeakland.org/about/intro/
Kathleen told us about her recent accomplishments regarding the Quick Guides: there are new translations available and she is asking for contributors for more languages. We discussed the two possible ways to do these translations: either by creating new Quick Guides for every language or by using Etoys' "translatable text" feature and having all translations in one set of Quick Guides.
- New Quick Guides: there is an open issue because in the current version Etoys allows only one set of Quick Guides, so incorporation needs some programming
http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ-60
- translatable text: layout can be an issue because of different text length in different languages, screenshots will always be english, because pictures will not be changed
Showcase issue: Christine reported a problem with her uploaded project on the showcase: there was a comment, that the project was not opened at the starting page and scripts were already done. We have to figure out what happened and create an issue on the tracker if this is a showcase problem.
education meeting, January, 21 and 28
Cherry, Randy, Rita, Avigail, Kathleen
At January 21 we talked about ideas to have Etoys projects and workshops in museums. While working on courseware, we will think how we can use parts of it for workshops. The paint box issue came up (from Rita): when starting Etoys 4, the painting area will be smaller then the screen. There are different opinions: while some like the larger area because the kids have freedom to paint big pictures, others had problems with these big paintings, because they are too big to be moved on the screen. We found out that we can just turn "etoys frindly" off and get the larger paint area. But to find the menu is not easy. We will go through all the preferences and make a list which of them we would like to have in a "Etoys Preference Pane".
Avigail asked if we will change the introductory page on the website
http://www.squeakland.org/about/intro/
Cathie Galas already reviewed a chapter, and the education team strongly suggests to give it a revision.
In the next week we talked about the upcoming book sprint and Tim's Haiti videos.
http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/haiti/waveplace_foundation_haiti_reb.html
We will focus on the book sprint right now to get the manual finished, which then can be translated. After that, we will go on with our courseware. We will get help from a teacher who knows Haiti and who will give us feedback how our courseware copuld be used there.