[etoys-dev] Thursday ed team meeting

[kharness at illinois.edu]

Rita, 
I have an appointment at the meeting time tomorrow and will have to miss this week. I'll read the notes.

Re: the agenda item about changing the opening screen
All three of the Tutorials and Demo projects are good and I have seen many students try them but, two need some revisions. 

The Self repeating demo has Navigator Bar graphics from a previous version of Etoys and the locations of things are for older versions too. Text 'You can make things with Etoys' floats up into the NavBar and the ' red text design and paint a car' floats too far down and persists past the page it was intended for.  Could the page with 'you can learn to drive a car' be redone using an event theatre like the paint a car page did? Otherwise when a beginner clicks on the blue steering wheel it just sticks to the cursor and no steering results. Getting a halo and using the blue rotate handle is not mentioned. 
page 6 the spaceship landing scripts and buttons do not show completely, maybe whole the book could be a little bigger.

Demon Castle, can/would the author make a few changes to the project? It is introduced as the first tutorial in a series but there is not a second one.
The art work is very appealing to kids however, Demon is a problem word in some cultures. I have had students who could not sing Happy Birthday, nor any religious, patriotic, nor songs of celebration of any description in school. They could not sing songs about Halloween for example. Demons, witches etc may push away people from other cultures and religions. The word magic will be a similar problem. Magic could be changed to the word knowledge or power instead, I think those would fit most cases. NB I get a bug report on page 7 and unless one already knows how to open the extra page controls the book ends there, too soon and too baffling for beginners. 
Page 10 of the book says " to be continued" but there is no book two for a successful beginner to find.

The Etoys Challenge all works. 
Regards,
Kathleen