[etoys-dev] popups in project-info

[Timothy Falconer]

On Sep 1, 2009, at 2:25 AM, Rita Freudenberg wrote:

> K. K. Subramaniam wrote:
>> On Monday 31 Aug 2009 9:10:39 pm Timothy Falconer wrote:
>>
>>> What does the larger group think?   Would you see "sixteen and  
>>> older"  in the drop-down as saying "put your adults-only stuff  
>>> here"?
>>>
>> I am wary of using ages in Etoy projects. It is tough on children  
>> who drop out and rejoin later. How about culturally neutral terms  
>> like  "Levels" 1 thru 5 or multi-age groups like {primary, higher  
>> primary, secondary, higher secondary, graduate}.
>>
> I think that we are mixing up two things here:
>
> - projects that are meant to help teachers getting started using  
> Etoys in the classroom, where the age category would be helpful (I'm  
> fine with grade, age or elementary/middle/highschool), and
>
> - projects that will be uploaded by the broader community, which are  
> meant to show what someone did, where we don't need any categories  
> at all
>
> I see two different structures for these different kinds of  
> "showcases". The "official" showcase will be the one with  
> categories, age groups etc., because we want to help teachers  
> getting ideas. And these projects will be selected carefully.
> All the other projects belong to a "public" showcase, where we don't  
> need these categories. Most of the students will not bother to think  
> about subjects when uploading their work, and they don't have to,  
> since categories are optional. We could even use tags for the public  
> showcase, because this showcase serves another purpose, it is the  
> possibility for everyone to share their work. We can pick up the  
> best projects from the public showcase to put into the official one,  
> "we" means all the people who apply to do that.
> So it wouldn't be necessary to categorize every project that goes to  
> the showcase, the categorization could be done later, when a project  
> gets selected. And of course there are projects which are explicitly  
> developed to be on the official showcase, but I don't think that  
> anyone here has a problem with categorizing these projects by age,  
> because that clearly means "target age".
>
> Greetings,
> Rita


A few thoughts from this . . .

First though, everyone should know that there are now two sections in  
the showcase that we're launching this month, the "featured" section,  
and the "public" section.   Featured projects are hand-picked by the  
squeakland education team.  Public projects are moderated for  
inappropriate content, but otherwise left alone.   As Rita says, there  
will be 30 to 100 featured projects, and many thousand public projects.

1. I see the public showcase perhaps a bit differently, not just as a  
place for individual users to show off their work (as they do on the  
Scratch website), but as the place for teachers from around the world,  
such as Chris Gordon from USeIT, to show off their students work, and  
their own demonstrations, etc.   My belief is that there will *MANY*  
projects that come from classes and homeschoolers that are appropriate  
for categorization.  These will all start out in the public section.    
The Squeakland showcase is really focused on encouraging such  
projects, in contrast with the Scratch site which is more "look at  
what I did".    Obviously we don't want to restrict "look at what I  
did", we want people to do what they want.  But the tone I'm hoping to  
set is that of a worldwide educational resource, with many, many  
examples of teacher/student use, not just what we feature.

2. These categories are optional, and that the drop-down says that  
they're optional.  No one has to pick target age, subject, or region  
if they don't want to.

3. We want to encourage people to choose these categories from the  
very beginning, so that when we promote a project from public to  
featured we don't have to guess what the author's intent was.

4. Let's at least see the new showcase before critiquing it.  It's  
just about done, and we can change things as we go (aka, agile :)

Take care,
Tim