[Newbies] Newbieology

[John Kershaw]

On 02/07/06, Ron Teitelbaum <Ron at usmedrec.com> wrote:
> How far did you get writing your own Etoy Tamagotchi's?

For my own 'stay ahead of the kids' learning I modelled my own fish
tank, based on my experiences of keeping fish for all of two months.
What I've found (in real life) is that over-feeding has been the cause
of most of my fishly 'deletions', so I tried to make 'water quality'
the most important factor. In my 'simulation' uneaten food pollutes
the water, and over-fed fish (heavier than 28g) pollute the water too.
The fish's health is directly affected by the water quality.

So... I was about to upload a copy of my file so you could see where
I'm at... and found I didn't know where Squeak was storing its files.
After some searching I found my squarium here:
~/Library/Preferences/Squeak/Internet/My Squeak/Squeaklets/aquarium16.001.pr

Preferences should really only hold preferences - I don't know if
anyone here can pass this on to the right people, but might I suggest
that a better place for Squeak to store its user files would be
something like:
~/Documents/My Squeak/aquarium16.001.pr

Anyhow, I've uploaded my aquarium file to the school website:
http://bradfordchristianschool.com/Squeakland - see 'Mr Kershaw's
aquarium' near the bottom

I also found some useful documentation links there - how ironic is
that, since I created that page myself several weeks ago?

Also I can't seem to get the mime-type correct in my .htaccess file.
I've tried numerous variations on this theme, but to no avail:

AddType application/x-squeak-object .pr

so for now you'll have to download my fish and run them locally.

Regards how far we've got with the kids' Tamagotchi's/pet shop
animals, lesson one (last Friday) consisted of:

1. Draw your rabbit / guinea pig / snake / lizard

2. Create a 'thirst' variable. Drag its tile to below your pet. Set it to 0

3. Drag out a script, call it 'live'

4. Drag a 'thirst' assignment tile, set it to 'thirst, increase by,
1'. Start the ticker. Reduce to 1 execution per second

5. Add a test to the script: thirst > 900. If yes, rotate pet by 90

I have this idea of getting a single pet 'maintainable' (if thirsty
drink water if available, click water to replenish when empty) then
creating siblings with slight random variations in drinking patterns,
and having to keep a whole pet shop fed & watered. Not sure how I'm
going to get there, but that's half the fun of teaching, right - to
stay ahead of the kids? ;)

Are there any pre-built conditional loops I could use on my scripts?
The if-then-else structure is fine, but a bit limiting.

Any/all help appreciated,

John.