"Lex Spoon" <lex at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> 
> Have you tried "gearing down" the stearing wheel: dividing the amount in
> the "turn by" command by 3 (or so) ?  It makes it much easier.  :)
> 
Haven't played with that much, although I was thinking I might modify it
to make the car's heading the same as the wheel's heading (not as much
like a real steering wheel, but easier to manage from a top-down
perspective).

I should have done this first, actually. We played around a lot with the
sound recorder. The kids love the reverb on the recorder. Everytime they
hear their voices echoing back at them they shout even louder into the
mike. It was a total hoot - managed to get some goodies to send to the
grandparents but could only externalize as a .wav file. Be nice to have
.mp3, but oh well.

Anyhow, we modified the script to get the kids voices to shout out
whenever the cars crashed into each other. I wasted more time trying to
get them to steer into each other than I did actually writing the
scripts. Got stung by some weirdness (okay, only weird if you're not a
Smalltalker :) when I renamed 'Car' to 'Yellow Car' (mnu #Car). Allowing
spaces in names is a pain, but it would be nice to have a clean way of
supporting them (possibly one could make spaces translate into something
else -- given the assignment operator, underscores are probably not a
good choice :) [Question: is allowing non-breaking spaces as part of
valid identifiers an option? If someone is editing a name and they hit
the space bar it could just drop one of those in].

Having two controls would be good. I loaded up the SpaceWar EToy from
Bob's SuperSwiki, but it's not as fun when you're playing by yourself. I
am intrigued by "Telemorphic" (saw the menu, have only a vague idea what it is,
but it sounds great), but I want to use Squeak for doing stuff with my
kids right now. I think that computers can be quite isolating and
conventional PCs are hard to integrate into a social environment (prolly
also true for pair programming). Rather than multi-user network
capabilities, I'm starting to think that maybe I should try and get some
external game controllers to hook up to the USB. Anyone know what it
would take to get Squeak to work with these? It would be cool to click
on a joystick morph and tell it, "you are connected to this controller
now".

A major point of frustration (moreso for my 2-year-old than for the
3-year-old -- it's amazing the difference in dexterity even though
people often think they're twins) is dealing with the keyboard and the
left/right/middle mouse button thing. I want to trash both devices. A
single-button mouse would be better. Maybe a G4 iMac with OSX for the
kitchen (when they come out). Must keep the kiddies away from Windows as
long as possible :)

So my son is now at the point where if he sees me reading mail in
Celeste, he will pull himself up (push me out of the way), navigate into
the Games world and start playing with the toothpaste game. The lesson
for me is that two years ago, when I first started using Squeak I
thought that the "non-standard" UI was a terrible weakness. I was wrong,
and I have been proven wrong in an utterly convincing way (by a
3-year-old who has absolutely no use for the marketing rhetoric of the
computer industry :).

> Overall, thanks for sharing your experiences -- I've found them an
> interesting read!

Thanks. I appreciate the encouragement.

Cheers,
Steve