hi rita,
Sad to say that I use Scratch far more than Etoys for
instruction. I think Scratch has a better startup interface,
which is important given the wide range of skills and interests
in students. Actually I wrote about this recently to the IAEP
list in response to Bryan Berry saying that new (to computing)
teachers in Nepal found using the touch pad with etoys a real
barrier. No one responded, footnote 1
Yes, I remember a discussion about how to use drawing as a
low-level-entry into Etoys, because of what Bryans says below, the
teachers in Nepal did very well with Draw. I would like to discuss
this aspect further, because we do know that the threshold to use
Etoys is too high. Yoshiki did came up with a first idea how to set
up Etoys to use it as a drawing tool. I have to look up the
discussion, but that is certainly an idea I would like to push
forward. I contacted Dr. Bhatta at OLE Nepal and he is very
interested in a collaboration. With the new Squeakland organisation
we will address the problems people have when using (or trying to
use) Etoys. I will contact the Kusasa people and ask them about
their experiences, I do know that the project is canceled and they
found Etoys difficult to use. But I hope we can come up with some
ideas how to improve this, and surely we will need UI experts!
There are a lot of things to consider, but I'm confident that we
will make the Etoys experience more satisfying!
one improvement would be for etoys to have prepackaged sprites, like scratch and game maker have - so kids have the option of either using an existing sprite or making their own
I could do a more detailed UI comparision b/w scratch and etoys (see footnote, tony)
or even set it as a project for my students this year perhaps
Unfortunate about the jumpy cursor problem on the xo (which still
persists on recent versions I find at startup and also if I leave
my xo switched on overnight - then need to reboot and then
wait until jumpy cursos settles down)
Etoys is better in some respects, particularly, Kedama (more
advanced, unfortunately haven't had the opportunity to use that due
to complexity of getting to that stage with the kids). Also the new
features on the xo for etoys - chat and passing objects with scripts
are really nice.
So, if the collaboration can be got working on the bootable USB
keys then I would do that demo if I get the opportunity to run
my xo evaluation again in 2009
Ok, I will follow up on this.
caroline meeks has a "sugar on a stick" blog going but the progress seems slow - http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick
Wolfgang Rohrmoser has developed a new "unofficial" live CD
recently but I haven't tested that yet, your mail reminded me to download it
ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090110.iso
ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_090110.pdf
Also the Scratch license is less than perfect which may inhibit its
distribution (of upgrades) on the xo, not sure about this - will see
but I can still use the upgrades on our Windows machines
oh, the other thing is that I do want to use Dr Geo for maths
next year if possible
Hilaire Fernandez will be happy to hear that! We contacted him and
we hope he will be a member of our new organisation as well.
that would be good - I'm also looking at Hilaire's iSTOA site, he sent
me an interesting pdf explaining it more - its on the squeak list
A suggested reading in English: https://gforge.inria.fr/docman/view.php/1308/5741/istoa-exercises.pdf
What I did was during my long service leave in 2007 was have a close
look at etoys and also squeak. And I did demo etoys at some
conferences and wrote about it a fair bit in my blog. Also I do
really like morphic and late binding (late binding is also in
scratch though). I rave about morphic but my students didn't see it
as anything special. (disappointing). But overall, I use Scratch more.
Happy to discuss any of this further
That would be great! The new organisation will focus on Etoys, but
will not exclude the other Squeak learning environments. Personally,
I do appreciate the fact that there is almost no ceiling when using
Squeak, you can start with Etoys and dig deeper and there are no
barriers. Unfortunately, it is not easy to do this transition with
the current Etoys version, but it is on the radar of the Squeakland
organisation.
I agree that the lack of a high ceiling is a problem with scratch -
my thoughts are start kids off with scratch and then try to transition
over to python - of course that is not ideal from an OOPs perspective,
smalltalk is probably better - but python is far more widely used
and far easier to argue the case amongst teachers
We do have three teams, education, software and development. The
board of directors is established and we are looking for additional
team members now. I would like to invite you to th education team
meeting to discuss ideas and directions for Etoys. We didn't have a
schedule yet for our first meeting, I think it will be at the end of
january after C5. Would you like to attend our meeting?
sure, by what medium - I'd like to attend remotely, need to check the
time zones though, as well - I go back to school on the 22nd Jan
but working part time so am fairly flexible
cheers,
- Bill