Tamika --

I have put the first pass at your tutorial on one of our swiki 
servers. As usual, the project turned out to be a lot easier to 
actually make than documenting it in enough detail to be useful! So I 
have quite a bit more writing to be done.  Also, I have to upload a 
lot more screen shots for the writing that has been done. I can see 
that this will take a few days. By contrast, the bare bones of the 
project took about 3 hours to do (of which about 2 hours was making 
and playing with the animated character).

However, there is enough there to get started (I hope).

Here is the URL: http://squeakland.org:8080/super/200

I did the entire project just using telephone rates (26K baud most of 
the time). Both Squeak and the swiki server performed really well. 
The main map is the biggest bottleneck at low data rates, but still 
is possible.

I would like to invite others in the Squeak list who are interested 
in the problems of documentation, etc., to participate. For example, 
it would nice for Tamika and her classmates to easily use Luciano's 
speech synthesis stuff for their animated character. Maybe Mark 
Guzdial and his colleagues at Georgia Tech can tell us about some of 
their experiments with etoys and other parts of Squeak.

Also, there are probably some very good documentation pages already 
done in this area that could be crossreferenced in the "Tamika 
Tutorial".

Tomorrow I will get another little stretch in the early morning to 
document how I made the animated world character, and also, I should 
publish my version of this project at some point. (Maybe not right 
away in order to test the usefulness of the tutorial).

Cheers,

Alan

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At 6:21 AM -0400 10/13/01, Knox, Tamika wrote:
>Hello! I was wondering if anyone here would be so kind as to help a helpless
>beginner (or a group of helpless beginners). :-(
>
>I'm currently in Senior Project at my university and me and my group mates
>came up with an idea to make a children's interactive learning software
>package. Nothing fancy, just something good enough to literally and
>figuratively make the grade. Anyway, we picked a project (well...our
>professor sort of did) and the language (well...our professor sort of picked
>that as well). The language is Squeak. Our professor feels that Squeak is
>the way to go. We'll have capability for .midi files and other things we
>would like to do.
>
>We decided to create a geography learning activity package which will have
>the following (adding bells and whistles if time permits after the initial
>program is executable):
>
> A main screen allowing the user (children ages 8-12) to go straight
>to the tutorial or take the quiz (which will be tri-leveled: beginner,
>intermediate, advance)
> The first screen on the tutorial will be a flat map of the world.
>The user can select a continent. From there, the user will be able to view
>information about that continent and can select a country. Then, specific
>details about that country is displayed such as an image of the country's
>flag, the population, the capital and other specifics
> The user in the beginning of the program will be prompted to input
>user's name and will be referred to as such throughout
> There will be an animated character (very simple character) in
>order to stimulate the user and to guide them and possible give helpful
>hints
> Images depicting the country such as wildlife and vegetation as
>well as sound effects will also be on the detail screens
>
>We have the data, we have the sources, and we have our screens all mapped
>out...flowchart and all. We will initially cover the first 50-100 highest
>populated countries and will add more data if time permits. This sounds all
>find and dandy for a group of seniors to tackle, right?
>
>Problem is, none of us know Squeak and we never programmed in Smalltalk. All
>of our members except myself (still waiting on Amazon to ship it) have
>purchased the Squeak book by Mark Guzdial. Those who have bought the book
>are having a difficult time grasping the concept. All of us mainly have
>knowledge in procedural languages such as Pascal and C. Not really strong
>OOP experience. Though I have scratched the surface almost five years ago
>with objects and inheritance in a C++ course.
>
>Can someone give us some helpful hints as to what we can do to accomplish
>our goals? My thing is I need some sample Squeak code...any code just to
>test run and get used to the new platform. I have read an excellent online
>tutorial about Smalltalk and with guidance from my aids, I think I can begin
>some simple code.
>
>Also, how should I arrange our data? Flat text files? If so, how does Squeak
>read outside data? I know that if you're using records in Pascal, you have
>to declare the amount of space for each record. From all of the Squeak
>information I printed out, I saw nothing that could aid us in this endeavor.
>I have no idea where to start as far as arranging my data on disc to be used
>by the program later. I at least want to have that part of the program under
>our belt.
>
>It would absolutely be appreciated if someone can help us out. Someone
>recommended that I subscribe to the list and that people here are extremely
>helpful. Our project is due in December. We may not get much accomplished,
>but I would like to be able to say that we put forth an effort to learn
>Squeak.
>
>Thank for reading and any and all suggestions will be GREATLY appreciated!


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