[etoys-dev] Re: [sq-education] repeat-tile

[Steve Thomas]

Rita,

If I put three sounds in a script without any repeat tile, you experience
the same problem (ie: the three sounds played at the same time), so I do not
believe the problem is with the Repeat tile.

The more general problem is how do you play a sound (of arbitrary length,
for example recording lines in a script) in sequence.
I have experienced the same problem/frustration in Etoys myself. Scratch
solves this problem by providing two tiles:

   - "play <sound>" - starts the sound playing and immediately executes the
   next tile (as Etoys "make sound <croak>" currently does
   - "play <sound> until done" - plays the sound until done then executes
   the next tile

Another nice feature of is the "wait" tile which allows you to pause a
script for a period of time which is useful in animated cartoons which
really motivate kids and I believe is one of the reasons kids prefer
Scratch.  Another nice feature I would like to see to help sequence events
is the implementation of a "wait" tile which pauses the execution of a
script for a period of time at the wait tile.

FYI to solve your problem (how to play a sound or sequence of sounds one
after the other) you can create a script that ticks for some unit of time
(lets say 1/2 second) and have a counter that increments upon each iteration
of the script. Then at the appropriate time/count you can play the next
sound in the sequence.  I did something similar in the Cartoon example (The
Holder Episosde 1v2
<http://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=9497> which
due to the joys of the squeakland website, I have not been able to make
public).
Frankly sequencing was cumbersome in that I had to know how long each
recorded sound was and would have preferred a simpler method.

I have included the developer list to get their comments as well.

Stephen



On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 9:17 AM, Rita Freudenberg <
rita at isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de> wrote:

>
> On Mar 26, 2010, at 2:03 PM, Steve Thomas wrote:
>
> Yes I have used the repeat tile in a number of projects.  Usually in
> iterating through objects in a collections.
>
> What was the specific problem?
>
> Can you provide more details on how it does not fit within the Etoys
> philosophy?
>
>
> The problem is, that tiles in a script are timeless. Everything in a script
> happens at the same time. for instance, when you put a "make sound" tile in
> a repeat tile and then say "repeat 3 times", you will not hear 3 sounds one
> after the other, but at the same time. This happens with every tile. It is
> confusing when you put tiles in, that do something you can watch or hear.
> So what happens is not the same as what you think would happen when looking
> at the script. But in Etoys you should be able to explain the behaviour from
> looking at the script, I think.
>
> Rita
>
>
> Stephen
>
> On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 8:46 AM, Rita Freudenberg <
> rita at isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> did you ever use the repeat tile? This is a new tile which you can get
>> when you click on the supplies icon in a script.
>> During my workshop this week we tried to use it and we had problems,
>> because it worked not the way we expected.  It is something special, which
>> is also not fitting very well with the Etoys philosophy. So how about
>> removing it, since it is mostly confusing?
>>
>> It would not be removed completely, so that older projects would still
>> work and you can find it if you explicitly search for it in the object
>> catalog. But it would be removed from the supplies menu in the scripts.
>> What do you think?
>>
>> Greetings,
>> Rita
>
>
>
>
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