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<div>(Preamble/Epigraphs)</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>>... I've been using Squeak since 2.7 and I have never come
across any<br>
>programming language or system that can humiliate me quite as
thoroughly<br>
>as Squeak does.<br>
></div>
<div>>... It is PAINFUL to feel stupid and dumb and helpless when
you are used<br>
>to feeling clever and competent, especially when the language
itself<br>
>is so simple.<br>
><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>R.
O'Keefe, 2/13/03</div>
<div>></div>
<div>> --------------------</div>
<div>></div>
<div>>Hello Rachel<br>
><br>
>Nine days ago you wrote the interesting mail below<br>
>to the Squeaklist.<br>
><br>
>May I ask you what are your expections for the documentation<br>
>team to come up with?<br>
><br>
>...</div>
<div>><br>
>There are various things which are beeing worked on now.<br>
>But we need "customers" like you. What are your
interests in<br>
>doing with Squeak?<br>
></div>
<div>><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>H.
Hirzel, 2/19/03</div>
<div>></div>
<div>> --------------------</div>
<div>></div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I am hoping this message will not make a persona non grata on
the Squeakdev list, or make me go squeaking back to my little lurker
hole in the wall ... but as a competent programmer in many languages
(and around Squeak since *before* 2.7), I nonetheless feel the way R.
O'Keefe does, *in spades*. And as for Rachel, cited in H.
Hirzel's epigraph/email, she, like so many newbies to the squeaklist,
appears to be long gone. I did begin, awhile ago, doing a kind
of ethnography-of-disappearing-squeak-newbi<span
></span>es, tracing their initial enthusiastic postings, the helpful
replies (always, always including Ned Konz, bless you sir), the
dreadfully high percentage of cases in which this initial enthusiasm
would fade away ... but it was too depressing, and to what end?</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I am not here to trash Squeak -- far from it! I have been
around so long, on and off, because I truly do believe, on the one
hand, that herein lies a potentially *great* environment for newbies
to programming. As a teacher of teachers and an advocate of
programming, this gets me very excited, as you can imagine.
(And the record 2005 posts to squeak-dev in Feb 2003 was due in no
small part to a sudden upsurge in the pedaogical consciousness of the
list...also exciting...less so recently...) But I think that if
the Squeak insiders really believe that "kids in fifth grade are
able to master etoys" (A. Raab, 2/10/03) without one or more
Squeak insiders hovering close by, they are sadly mistaken!
(This is similar to a problem a fellow named Papert had vis a vis the
"learnability" of Logo in the late 70's - early
80's....)</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>"So why should we even listen to this guy?"
("Maybe he really can't even program his way out of a paper
bag...") Well, maybe some of you have stopped already.
I've made many false starts in Squeak, and the responsiveness of Ned
Konz, Karl Ramberg, and Stephane Ducasse (to name a few) to my
previous postings is part of what keeps me around ... now I'm
responding, instead of Rachel, to Hannes Hirzel's request.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>>But we need "customers" like you. What are your
interests in<br>
>doing with Squeak?</div>
<div><br>
***I want to see -- and show others -- a viable learning path through
etoys to Morphic-Squeak proper.***</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>I have some "field notes" from an attempt I made to
show etoys to teachers-to-be in UCSD's Teacher Education Program that
I would love to share with people on this list. Some of the
contents border on painful, but if I could only answer all *their*
questions (and remember, if I am twice-, these teachers are
three-times-removed from Squeak-insiderness), I would be able to
document some of the projects on Alan's "Partial list of Etoy
Projects" -- posted to Squeakland 2/11/03 (but not
SqueakDev!). Get a load of these (the total "partial"
list was almost 40 lines long):</div>
<div><font face="Courier New" size="+1" color="#000000"><br>
Orbits<br>
Springs<br>
Weighing<br>
Gradient following - Salmon and Clownfish<br>
Tree Growing<br>
Epidemics<br>
Multiple Mentalities<br>
Grey Walter Conditioned Response Learning<br>
Circuit Models</font></div>
<div>Anyone who could create projects like these in any programmable
medium, I'd say, would have a serious leg up on "real"
programming by anyone's hard-nosed definition of that elusive (and
ever-changing) concept. My students (same ones as above) wrote
programs in NetLogo, Microworlds (a descendant of Logo), and
Stagecast Creator, including a "Turtle Epidemic" model in
NetLogo for which I wrote the tutorial (see
http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/reso<span
></span>urces.shtml) and a "Food Fight" game in Stagecast
Creator, for which I'd love to be able to write the "etoys
tutorial", if I could only see how to do several simple things
in Etoys, for example</div>
<div> * have an agent (smiley) create another agent (burger)
in the space next to him</div>
<div> * have an agent (smiley) send a message to a counter
agent (count down) each time he "uses up" a burger, and
another message to a counter-scorer agent (count up) each time one of
his burgers hits his opponent</div>
<div>...just to name two.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>So, speaking of "viable learning paths", does anyone
have a suggestion for one for *me*? Who wants to respond to all
the questions my teacher-students raised in my field notes? Who
wants to help me complete all the projects on Alan's list?</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>If *I* can't figure out how to do this stuff on my own, there's
no way any of the teachers I teach -- even after they've been
thoroughly Balzano-indoctrinated to the virtues of programming and
completed my more-rigorous-than-99%-of-other-teacher-<span
></span>ed-computer-courses course -- will be able to figure it out
either.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Respectfully submitted,</div>
<div>Jerry Balzano</div>
<div><x-tab> </x-tab></div>
<div>-------------------------<br>
Dr. Gerald J. Balzano<br>
Teacher Education Program<br>
Dept of Music<br>
Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition<br>
Cognitive Science Program<br>
UC San Diego<br>
La Jolla, CA 92093<br>
(619) 822-0092<br>
gjbalzano@ucsd.edu</div>
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