from Kathleen
Etoys can indeed help children know, understand, and apply many valuable facts and concepts but, I think it is application, analysis, and synthesis that are the strengths of Etoys. I much prefer that we present Etoys as a language and an entry into computer science worth studying on its own merits. I was discouraged when music educators started adding goals like 'improves citizenship' as if the study of music was not worthy unless it was attached to some other anchors. Bah!
from Abe-san
I think the prime clients are children. I learned it from Scratch
community. Their web site has 0.3 million projects. Meanwhile,
Japanese SuperSwiki site has only 6 hundreds projects. Kids teach and
learn each other at the Scratch forum everyday.
The secondly clients are teachers. They are busy in daily work. And
they are conservative. They want easy and immediate effect curriculum.
My failure was introducing Etoys as an animation tool in early days.
It was very effective for diffusion. It makes every children, teachers
and parents happy. However that's all.
Now, I try to make new curriculum for "real science and real math". It
must be interesting. And I'd like to change the role of teacher as a
facilitator.
from Bill Stelzer
Hey Tim -
Read this email after another tough lesson for the teachers with eToys. I'm not sure if the developers realize the ramification of user issues in the field. Today was a lesson in frustration as I was just trying to teach a simple Test lesson. Everyone was quietly working. After they had some time with it for a while I asked if there were any problems. Sure enough everyone had one. When I went to look it was just painful
One project was completely locked up, even after I spent five - ten minutes trying to fix it. Nothing but the cursor would move. Could not begin to see what was wrong or even save it as the most of the scripts were partially off the page and the viewer blocked the keep icon. So I forced quit - loosing everything. Another teacher had a slowly rotating book, which had bogged down the system, requiring a slow and tedious process of trying to switch off scripts as they were revealed and disappeared. (The rotating book blocked the etoys tool bar so no way to get into the supply bin for stop all scripts commands.) Another project just had minor errors, fixed those and it still didn't work. Some more trouble shooting finally revealed that the sound system of the entire XO had ceased working.
All this took time that could of been spent learning etoys. I didn't even get to the next two computers with problems. Everyone was frustrated and fried and it started to pour and they had to head home as the roads get pretty bad in the rain - and we all just agreed to meet again early in the morning.
Anyways wrote this suggestion list immediately after. Cutting and pasting it here -
Am writing from the front line of the eToys battles, in this case the small remote fishing village of Petite Riviere Des Nippes in Haiti, where I have been training kids and teachers for the past week.
Believe me when I say that I have witnessed the horrors of eToys in the hands of untrained professionals. Specifically those who have never touched a computer before and working with a language other than English. More times than I care to remember, I have watched the dream of constructionism die a cold hard death in a nightmare of locked up XOs and scattered and lost tiles and sketches and scripts.
First it is imperative for the programmers to actually work with eToys on the XO to get an idea of the problem. It is is much more difficult to use it there than on a PC or Mac. Everything is smaller and requires much more skill to find and manipulate, especially with the XO's less than perfect trackpad. Plus they should preferably test out eToys on the XO by creating a book with at least a dozen pages and filled with numerous sketches and scripts. (And then have a number of those scripts contain errors.) Keep in mind that a PC or Mac is many many times more powerful and can take up that slack - but that scenario on an XO is painful.
So first off there needs to be an emergency save and exit keyboard command - when everything goes to hell and eToys locks up. As the viewer is over the keep and exit icons when it's up, that's not an option. Also - sometimes you can close and save eToys from the sugar frame, but usually not.
Also the active area for clicking the Halo icons needs to be larger. As it is it is too easy to miss the icon - thus closing Halo and having to start over. The heading arrow is especially hard to click. Also when you click with left button by mistake to open the halo - you are suddenly in pick up mode and need to click the left button again to get out of it so you can then click the right button. Would be nice if the right button could just cut in. Also - manipulating the halo icons requires switching back to the left button. Would be nice if either left or right button worked worked for that.
As for the book. Difficult to impart the pain I've gone through because of that removable navigation bar. Takes just one wrong click to remove it from the book. In theory you could re-embed it again, but that too is fraught with danger. One it's a pain to explain and do - specially for a kid. Plus the last time I did it, it only let me embed it to a page, not to the book. So as soon as you turned the page, it was goodbye to the navigation bar - as well as to ever being able to turn the page again - thus essentially destroying the book.
On that same note, if you right click the eToys main navigation bar, you get the halo along with the delete icon. If you then accidently click the delete icon, the main navigation bar is deleted. Why in God's holy name is this even possible? What purpose does this serve, other than tears for the child and to drive people like me insane while trying to rescue the project?
Anyways I have many, many more suggestions from the field to make eToys better, but for now these are the ones to address right away.
It is important to keep in mind the circumstances that etoys will be used under. It's not always an air conditioned classroom filled with new Macs. Instead it may be a hot humid, cramped and falling apart area with no electricity or lights, with kids and teachers fighting frustration as they try and make it all work on a tiny, low powered XO. To make the dream work for them, eToys has to become less about the challenge of physically making it work and more about the challenge of discovering what they can do with it.