Is it alive?

[Kim Rose]

Hi, Chris -

Well, Marcus beat me to a reply -- thank you, Marcus, (!) but I agree 
with some of your points; expecially #2.  That is why BJ Conn from 
the Open Charter School in LA and I are working on a Squeak 'Project 
Book'.  Our book will be geared for teacher use to provide examples 
of etoys children can create to help amplify math and science.  We 
hope it can be one of many books as ours will be greared to kids aged 
10-13 (ish) and focussed in a particular content area.  I think books 
written for kids would be fantastic as well.

Marcus pointed out that the squeak.org download is not the one we 
intend for kids.   This is better delivered via the Squeakland site.

I believe and hope that as our community grows those of us using 
Squeak with kids will share our examples and projects to develop a 
meaningful body of projects and shareable knowledge -- Alan likes to 
call this "1,000 pieces of content" -- sort of an online encyclopedia 
people can access and create and learn from Squeak based examples.
Thanks for your comments and offers to help make this a reality!
cheers,
Kim

PS -- Marcus -- I LOVED the Dilbert -- thanks for sharing!!!



At 4:12 PM +1200 9/27/02, Christopher Sawtell wrote:
>On Thu, 26 Sep 2002 23:01, Kidd, Gary wrote:
>>  I work for the US Dept of Defense Domestic Schools, based in Peachtree
>>  City, Ga.  The list led me to squeakland, and I am fascinated by what I
>>  have seen and been able to play with on the website.  How can I find out
>>  more about how we may be able to infuse squeak into our schools?
>
>imho, getting squeak out there needs a few things:
>
>1) A live CD which somebody can just pop into a CD drive on a PC and boot to
>get Squeak working. It does not matter what the underlying o/s is. A possible
>example method is at:- http://www.knoppix.org/ which provides a Live Linux
>CD. It would not be too difficult to replace the unneeded window manager and
>applications with a Squeak system.
>
>2) Books which are understandable by children of all ages, yet don't talk down
>to them.
>
>3) a Joystick interface. Controlling the e-toy objects is really quite hard if
>you only have a mouse as the interface.
>
>4) Removal of the red cautionary-tale text screen which greets you 
>on starting   
>up a 3.2 image. If you tell them it's difficult right at the start, the
>masses will take off like scaled cats, never to be seen again. Actually
>Smalltalk is difficult only if your mind has been horribly corrupted by many
>years of traditional computer programming.
>
>Given time, I could probably:-
>
>Make 1.
>
>Provide input to 2. I'm not sufficiently au fait with the Squeak Smalltalk
>language yet to originate this, but have had a fair amount of contact with
>children, and could, with the help of various children we know, be an
>effective editor.
>
>3 is totally beyond my knowledge.
>
>
>>  Thanks
>>
>>  -----Original Message-----
>>  From: Alan Kay [mailto:Alan.Kay at squeakland.org]
>>  Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2002 6:48 PM
>>  To: squeakland at squeakland.org
>>  Subject: Re: Is it alive?
>>
>>  Yes. Kim, Roxanne Maloney and I are in Japan where the city of Kyoto
>>  is planning on putting versions of the "etoy curriculum" in 6 schools
>>  in the Spring (2 each of elementary, middle and high school).
>>
>>  Cheers,
>>
>>  Alan
>>
>>  ------
>>
>>  At 2:49 PM -0700 9/25/02, Lawson English wrote:
>>  >Haven't gotten a new message from this list in over 3 weeks. Is anyone
>  > >there?
>
>--
>Sincerely etc.,
>Christopher Sawtell


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