Book for gifted 12 year old.

[Christopher Sawtell]

Kim Rose wrote:
> Hi, again, Chris -
> 
> Well, BJ (Conn) may kill me for announcing this, but I believe she may 
> have already said so...she and I are working hard on such a book!

That's _wonderful_ news.
Please don't shy away from introducing the browsers and keyboard scripting.

> (Together, with Alan, we've developed and tested over a 2 1/2 year 
> period with BJ's students, a year's curriclum.)  But, the book is not 
> complete yet.  We're hard at work and aiming at having it available next 
> Spring -- since BJ goes "back to school" in just a couple weeks, our 
> working time will minimize, but we've given ourselves a forcing 
> function/deadline and plan to have the book available by early Spring.

By which I assume you mean March-April? Living in New Zealand as I do, 
I'm not very au fait with the North American seasons. Anyway if you 
would like another beta-tester for your book, I / we am / are only too 
happy to offer our input. It's Linux at home here, OS X on iMac at 
school, and Windows in most of the children's homes.

> It will be geared toward students ages 10-12 or 13 and their teachers 
> and parents.  We will have over a dozen project examples and also show 
> the underlying math and science concepts each amplifies.

_That_ is exactly what this country needs so urgently!! Sadly, all the 
really good teachers get 'stolen' by the first-world countries.

> We *know* there is a need for such a thing...AND MORE too!  We want our 
> book to be the *first* (or one) of many.  We hope others using Squeak 
> will be inspired to share their examples, ideas and usage -- that other 
> teachers choosing to integrate Squeak into their curricula will share 
> how they've done so.

Here in NZ, which is a country with a very practical orientation, it's 
the fact that Squeak is sitting on a very real and intensely accessable 
computing environment that caused the interest. Smalltalk is, after all, 
a language used in the industry. One of the teachers was watching me 
last Tuesday, and was obviously amazed that just a few lines of script 
produced a multi-coloured circular object which we could then play with 
using the eToy environment.

They are moving the o/s to OS X for next school term. I just hope that 
everything continues ok.

> Remember HyperCard?

Heard of it but that's all. I've been into unix stuff for a long time.

> People were very puzzled as to what it was and how 
> to use it.  It wasn't until teachers and other interested "programmers" 
> created and published examples of content produced in HyperCard that it 
> really 'caught on' and the market grew.
> 
> So, please -- an appeal to others of you creating interesting 
> Squeak-based projects - let us know who you are -- we'd be delighted to 
> post your examples on the Squeakland site, or point to your site(s) AND 
> market/disseminate other project books/examples. Our book is going to 
> take a little more time.

There is an implementation of Scrabble at:-

http://webs.sinectis.com.ar/jmvuletich/Scrabble/Scrabble.html

I hope the copyright implications don't preclude it being included in 
your book. It would not run using the 3.2 vm "out of the box" for me, 
but I did not try very hard to get it to go.

> Thanks for your purchase of the "Blue" Squeak Book -- I recommend "Back 
> to the Future" for some history, John Maloney's chapter on "Morphic" and 
> John Steinmetz's chapter on Squeak in the classroom.

I've looked briefly at some of the pre-publication .pdf files of the 
chapters which are on the net.

> cheers,
> Kim
> 
> 
>> Kim Rose wrote:
>>
>>> Hi, Christopher -
>>> Is she using the 'etoy' /programming with tiles interface or other 
>>> interface in Squeak?
>>> Kim
>>
>>
>> Oh yes, and enjoying it greatly! And since I showed her the button in 
>> the square at the top of the scripting panel, she clicks in there 
>> after almost operation with a tile to see what the computer has put 
>> into her script!
>>
>> Out of the run-of-the-mill mold, this child is not!
>>
>> What I'm really looking for is a book / paper / www site which 
>> explains how to use the various browsers, and yet is written in such a 
>> way that it neither assumes that you have already had years of 
>> experience with computers, nor are a rather dim 6 or 7 year old.
>>
>> I know that such a book is probably not available, because I spent 
>> most of yesterday afternoon on Amazon.com looking for something which 
>> might be appropriate, but was disappointed. It would seem that there 
>> might be niche waiting to be filled.
>>
>> I did however order a copy of your book for myself, I look forward to 
>> reading it.
>>
>> -- 
>> Sincerely etc.
>> Christopher Sawtell.
>>
>>>> Greetings List,
>>>>
>>>>   I need some guiding about a book title for a very talented girl of 
>>>> about 12 who is getting into squeak _very_ fast.
>>>>
>>>> Is there anything out there - on paper or otherwise - which is 
>>>> between the "How to make a halo appear" type of tutorial and the 
>>>> complex utterances from the real cognoscenti?
>>>>
>>>> Tnx a 10^6.
>>>>
>>>> -- 
>>>> Sincerely etc.,
>>>> Christopher Sawtell.
>>>
> 
>