Bert --

I'd love to try this. Some of the formula editors I've tried have 
been unwieldy, others have made it difficult to think about the 
relationships. How about taking a try at a user-friendly one? We have 
a fresh batch of 10-12 year olds this year!

Cheers,

Alan

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At 12:19 PM +0200 10/15/02, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>Alan,
>
>I think the "kids way" of doing math is the same as for everybody else:
>formulas. If we had a formula editor that's reasonably easy to use, that
>would be even more helpful than using universal tiles, in my opinion,
>because they are essentially just a graphical presentation of a
>programming language.
>
>I could imagine that for numerical parameters, clicking the expand arrow
>gives an empty "math tile" and a floating palette of operators similar to
>the paint palette. You can type numbers and type or drag/drop operators in
>there. Operands (other object's numerical readouts) can be dropped, too.
>
>  Perhaps in an advanced mode, these operands could be assigned a
>single-letter variable name. This would make complex formulas much more
>readable.
>
>A formula editor would most straightforwardly resemble what kids learn in
>school. I think the problem is not the math itself, but the usually
>awkward methods to write math in a computer language. Do you agree?
>
>-- Bert
>
>On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Alan Kay wrote:
>
>>  Bert --
>>
>>  It's an "unfinished feature" in search of an idea. It's unfinished
>>  because we didn't come up with a really nice and simple way to deal
>>  with subexpressions in etoys. The idea was to solve this problem at
>>  the next scripting level -- for Omniusers -- but this didn't get
>>  finished either, so no solution was moved to etoys. I expect that all
>>  of this will be much better and nicer in a few months. However, we
>>  still don't have a great "kids way" to think about and make
>>  subexpressions. Got any good ideas?
>>
>>  Cheers,
>>
>>  Alan
>>
>>  -----
>>
>>  At 12:14 PM +0200 10/14/02, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>>  >I think this is a bug, or confusing at least:
>>  >
>>  >When constructing arithmetic expressions with tiles, they bind from right
>>  >to left. However, the graphic representation suggests a left-to-right
>>  >order, which also would be the "smalltalky" way of binding. It only gets
>>  >obvious when one looks at the textual representation.
>>  >
>>  >My particular case was limiting the range of a variable using min: and
>>  >max:. Of course, I constructed it as "[value][max:][-20][min:][20]".
>>  >But the actual code generated is "value max: (-20 min: 20)".
>>  >
>>  >A workaround is to use "[-20][max:][20][min:][value]" which results in
>>  >"-20 max: (20 min: value)" but this is surprising, at best.
>>  >
>>  >I don't see a simple solution. Any ideas?
>>  >
>>  >-- Bert


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