On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Edward Mokurai Cherlin mokurai@sugarlabs.org wrote:
I have completed a first pass over the draft Etoys Reference Manual, adding as much information as I could easily find about Object types, program tiles, tools, menus, and so on, and adding outlines for a chapter on Etoys programming and a Glossary. More information is needed.
I am in a strange position, learning Etoys by writing substantial portions of its Reference Manual, something that I do not think would be possible for any other programming system. I found the early tutorials a delight, up to the point where everything else was completely opaque to me. After learning a bit of Squeak, and getting just a few more hints, I found Etoys starting to make real sense, and now I can use a substantial subset of it. When I get through the parts of this manual that I can do, I will turn to creating Etoys projects to illustrate the issues I found missing, and to take up various education topics. Some will be in the manner of my Turtle Art tutorials and Tony Forster's, but of course Etoys supports doing far more than that.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt/Tutorials
Can anybody help with these Etoys objects that either need explanation or are simply not present in the versions I have access to? In particular, communication between Etoys sessions and users remains entirely opaque to me.
Communications
Attachment Adjuster
For connectors.
Badge Fridge NebraskaServer
These are all of a etoys networking experiment. I do not think they are of much use to students unless they are enhanced quite a bit
Objects not found in Object Catalog--Can we remove these?
Calendar
This is a basic calendar. It has a few tiles associated with it
Dr Geo is a whole book of features. http://www.drgeo.eu/
Flap
Flaps are a very useful widget that you can use to hold and hide objects of all sorts. You can have local flaps that hold objects in just the current project ( viewers are local flaps). You can have global flaps that you can access in all projects (the help flap and the 'gold box ' are global flaps). Flaps are basically a PasteUpMorph that can slide in and out from the edge of another PasteUpMorph. You can use the same settings for flap panes as for PasteUpMorphs. Flap tabs can be edited for name and color, edge bevel etc.
Graph Graphing H Number Linecan Key press Speech Bubbles
I do not know much about these objects.
Other
Arrow Editor
This is part of connectors. Could probably be hidden. Quite buggy.
Image How to substitute another image?
Particles What is Kedama? http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1092381
Kedama: A GUI-Based Interactive Massively Parallel Particle Programming System http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/VLHCC.2005.49 Purchase article: $19
http://community.ofset.org/index.php/Etoys_and_Kedama
I plan to combine redundant accounts of particular features, move a few topics to what seems to me a more logical order, and add some more topics. I especially plan to explain how Etoys development tools work, and how one accesses Squeak development tools from Etoys. A tutorial on either Etoys or Squeak development is, of course, inappropriate for this manual, but I do want to demonstrate how one can look inside Etoys object definitions using Squeak. This question is somewhat confusing, because things may have different names and different structures in their Etoys and Squeak manifestations. Has anybody ever made a tool for exposing the structure of the Squeak definitions of Etoys objects?
Some experiment have been done. Nothing I know of that is 'student ready'.
Lots more questions to come
Sounds great
Karl
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-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks _______________________________________________ etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev