On 01.07.2009, at 11:40, Ryan Simmons wrote:
I some ways I agree with Ramon, that Squeak should become more aimed at developers.
I do however feel that education is very important I was especially impressed by Dr. Geo II. I feel that EToys, Dr. Geo etc should become applications that can be loaded in very much like Seaside can be loaded into a variety of smalltalks.
Yes, that is a nice goal. This just takes considerably more effort than simply ripping it out, in particular since much of Squeak was designed to support Etoys without drawing a strict boundary. But help is welcome in disentangling.
I will probably not be too popular for saying the following, but I fail to see how EToys helps to teach children the use of smalltalk, (and hence why I am confused that so many feel that it should be part of Squeak) if it is there to help teach programming concepts to children then I would also have to say that Scratch seems to be a much better tool for doing this.
You are right - Scratch indeed prepares you better for using a "real language" later with its complete coverage of control structures. The scripts you build in Scratch can very easily be matched to some other syntax (in fact, there exists a "Python" localization that makes the Scratch tiles look like Python code), and reversely are immediately familiar to someone knowing a programming language already.
Etoys is primarily about modeling behavior rather than learning to program. Its target age group is elementary school children, whereas Scratch targets teenagers. Etoys is used to make animations, tell stories, create simulations, little games, do presentations etc. It's not for the computer science class.
But the major difference is that Etoys lets you escape to Smalltalk once you reach its limits. Scratch is intentionally a closed world, Etoys is intentionally open. You can at any time switch an Etoys script to its textual representation and edit the Smalltalk code, accessing any Squeak feature you want. Or you can create your own classes and incorporate them in an Etoys project. This gives you an environment so powerful it's second to none.
- Bert -