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

[karl ramberg]

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Steve Thomas <sthomas1 at gosargon.com> wrote:
> 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

Sound playing do not have the best implementation. Play until done is a hack.

>
> 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.

 Wait, delay, pause or duration are missing from current Etoys. You
can do this but it is hard and quite crude.



> 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 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

I feel your pain

Karl
>
>
> 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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