News January 2008

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Popularity on the rise: Coding (and Consulting) Kid-Style With Scratch
by Klaus D. Witzel 07 Jan '08

07 Jan '08

See below, especially "... elective program classes have used Scratch to deliver consulting and programming services for students at another school." and "They made products that are real pieces of software, adapted to the needs of real clients." :) /Klaus <quoted from ACM's TechNews> "Coding (and Consulting) Kid-Style With Scratch" T.H.E. Journal (12/07); Schaffhauser, Dian MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten research group has developed Scratch, a programming language designed to help kids learn mathematical and computational concepts along with the process of design. A paper about Scratch explains that the language can nurture skills in the areas of information and communication, thinking and problem-solving, and interpersonal and self-direction. The Scratch Web site freely offers the program for download, examples, tutorials, and discussion forums, and approximately 45,000 people have registered on the site thus far. Programming via Scratch allows kids to blend together sounds, music, graphics, and photos by dragging and dropping graphical command blocks onto a Scripts work area. The program begins with a "sprite" character that users can manipulate with command blocks, and starting and stopping scripts involves the user clicking a green flag and a red stop sign button, respectively. Students in Expo Elementary School teacher Karen Randall's elective program classes have used Scratch to deliver consulting and programming services for students at another school. Randall says the language helped her team experience the process of design in a deeper and more meaningful way. "They made products that are real pieces of software, adapted to the needs of real clients," she says. http://www.thejournal.com/articles/21743 </quote>

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News Report Dec 2007
by Ron Teitelbaum 03 Jan '08

03 Jan '08

Happy New Year everyone, Here is your news report for Dec 2007 and the year. We had a big hit with Craig's pictures http://news.squeak.org/2007/12/29/old-smalltalk-pics-from-parc-place/. There was an amazing amount of interest: 29,614 hits! Thank you! Craig helped us to beat our record and gave us our best day ever of 17,959 hits on Dec 30 (this was more then all the hits we received last month). This was a very nice way to end the year. Our second place post was http://news.squeak.org/2007/12/05/demand-olpc/ with: 1279 hits. We had only 5 posts for the month. Our search hits continue to be very strong on search keys that include 'OLPC'. For the entire year of 2007 we had 179,745 hits. This was our first full year (total of 16 months). My impressions of the Weekly Squeak are that we are doing quite well. I've noticed that there is a lot of talk about Smalltalk and Squeak and we are receiving a number of links from other communities, blogs and web sites. I'm sure most of the buzz has been generated by OLPC, Croquet and Seaside but I would like to believe that we helped a little to raise the awareness of other developers about the Squeak community and our continued support and progress. We have a terrific community and I'm looking forward to the new year of Squeak and Smalltalk. We are proud to be a part of and support this community. Thank you for supporting and reading the Weekly Squeak! Ron Teitelbaum and The Squeak News Team

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News January 2008