[squeak-dev] A Suggested Promotion

Richard Eng horrido.hobbies at gmail.com
Tue Dec 22 11:11:12 UTC 2015


I have a suggestion for future Smalltalk advocates...

The advent of Pi Zero last month is an interesting opportunity. This is a
very, very cheap Raspberry Pi. Anyone can afford it. I'm thinking of kids,
in particular.

What if we could get kids to delve into Squeak or Pharo (Squeak is better
optimized for Raspberry Pi) via the Pi Zero? A competition could be set up
in various countries, such as Canada, Britain, Australia, Japan, etc.,
where the best student submission for a Smalltalk-based Pi Zero application
would win a small scholarship prize (say, $500). A panel of judges in each
country would decide the winner.

The contest would be much less ambitious than my now-defunct Canadian
Smalltalk Competition
<https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1520902870/canadian-smalltalk-competition>
(CSC). Less control (no real need to prevent cheating). Easier to raise the
prize money. The nice thing is that it would be a multi-national promotion
(it's tough getting a national school competition like CSC going in other
countries).

Of course, because it's less ambitious, we can expect to reach fewer kids.
Instead of thousands, probably more like hundreds. I could be totally wrong
on this; I could be totally surprised!

I might even come out of retirement
<https://medium.com/@richardeng/today-is-the-first-anniversary-of-smalltalk-renaissance-b4bd0c43538c>
to offer some creative services (eg, promotional graphics, websites, etc.).
😁

Anyway, it was just an interesting thought I had. Don't know if it stands
up to scrutiny.

Cheers,
Richard
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