How to bring EToys across - any info/outlines/guidelines?

Bruce Cohen brucecohen at qwest.net
Fri Apr 19 18:10:09 UTC 2002


This may be at an angle to what you want to do, but I've been playing 
with Boxer lately, as a result of reading  diSessa's book "Changing 
Minds" a few weeks ago.  The whole point of Boxer and Logo before it 
is to provide a way for schoolchildren to learn about computing by 
doing it, and many of the techniques they use should be adaptable to 
EToys.  You might get some ideas for workshop projects from the 
teaching projects that have been developed for these languages.  Try 
the following sites as a start

Boxer:
http://www.soe.berkeley.edu/~boxer/index.html

Logo:

It shouldn't be hard to write a Logo or Boxer interpreter for Squeak, 
in fact, I've been wondering how difficult it would be to write a 
BoxerMorph as a Project subclass, so you would have an entire Boxer 
environment built on Squeak.  It's on my list to look into soon.

Bruce

At 4:56 PM +0200 4/19/02, Cees de Groot wrote:
>So this is the third post where I'm referring to the fact that I did a demo
>this morning. Gee, I must be really proud of myself ;)
>
>It was the eventlet I talked about a couple of months ago, where I had the
>opportunity to try to explain to groundschool children (groups 5-8 which
>translates to roughly 8-12 years) what being a programmer is all about. It
>turned out that just showing the difference between a painted turtle being
>manually clicked around and one running in circles by virtue of a little
>snippet of code being repeatedly executed was already a reasonable hook to
>start talking about some of the issues.
>
>Anyway, some of the kids were really drooling over Squeak, so I'm thinking
>about asking the school whether I can do a voluntary workshop for the
>highest grades (a couple of weeks long maybe one hour per week). The
>problem, of course, is that I'm probably too old and rusty to learn
>EToys by myself, which bears with it a serious risk that I will stand
>in the way of the children's explorations.
>
>Is there some material available that could help me drafting some sort of
>outline for the workshop, remind me about things I need to tell (and things I
>need to keep my big mouth shut about), etcetera?
>
>We've got networked PC's on the school, they're all reasonable Squeak machines
>(PII's with 800x600 screens).
>
>Thanks for any pointers.
>
>Regards,
>
>Cees
>--
>Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg at cdegroot.com>
>GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B


-- 
"The joke is over when the head falls off." - Scotts' proverb
=========
Bruce Cohen
5908 SW California St.
Portland, OR 97219
brucecohen at qwest.net



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