Squeak ideas for a classroom/clubhouse

Jahanzeb Sherwani jahanzeb
Fri Apr 18 14:54:41 PDT 2003


Hello everyone,

Thanks to everyone who replied... it's been excellent advice, and I will
write back in great detail to each of your mails individually. Right now,
I'm in between the two weekly sessions (Tue & Thu) and have a truckload of
things to take care of before then, most importantly planning the next
session and going over what happened in our first one with my research
supervisor. I can probably write a rather good "How NOT to conduct your
first squeak session with children" paper right now! :) Having been through
one session, and reading your mails again, I realize the importance of a
variety of pertinent points that each of you have put across.

For instance, I assumed that the tutorials would be a great place to start,
so I cobbled together an offline version of the tutorial page on
squeakland.org and we got the kids to start off with the Paint tutorial.
However, without having a *need* to learn, and a context to learn within,
it seemed to everyone that we were introducing nothing more than a
glorified paint program, until the very end when we were able to get them
to put in some basic functionality. That was just one of the mistakes we
made in our research design.

One suggestion that I have, though, is that in the Paint tutorial where it
says to drag a paint icon into the working area, MOST kids dragged it out
onto the world, not just the work area, and so weren't able to access the
nextpage prevpage yellow buttons. In fact, I even made this mistake myself
at home, but I figured that others would not be silly enough to do it too!
If there's any workaround for that problem, it might help for subsequent
users of the tutorial. Just a suggestion!

I can describe the various problems (mostly due to my mistakes in setting
up the structure session) in great detail if anyone is interested.
Actually, my research supervisor (who co-conducted the session with me)
suggested we should actually write another paper on what we were thinking,
and how things actually happened, so that others who embark on similar
projects don't get into them again.

Anyway, I'll get to these concerns on the weekend most probably. Right now
I have a few pressing technical concerns that I need to fix before our next
session:

1) The school's PCs are networked, but offline. On installing the squeak
plugin, and running it, it asks for updating itself but cannot. Would
copying over the SqueakPlugin.image file from an updated version fix this?
I'm now assuming it will, but I didn't get a chance to try this because the
error came too late in the game for me to try new things at the time.

2) To demonstrate the simplest of scripts, by creating a sketch, and then
dragging the "Sketch Forward by 5" tile to the workspace, 50% of the time
the tile transforms into a new script, and the other 50% it just sits there
as a tile (and not a script). Only after dragging an "empty script" tile,
and then putting the "forward by 5" tile onto it, does it achieve the
desired effect. Is there something that I'm doing differently in these 2
scenarios, or is it something else?

3) Whats the easiest way of creating a central place where they can put
their projects up in separate spaces, yet shareable and viewable by all? I
have a swiki running on one of the PCs, and they are all on a LAN. 

4) To save a project, does the Publish button save it both locally and on a
server? Also, what's the easiest way for them to browse the projects that
they have saved, without getting into the hassle of dragging-and-dropping
from Windows explorer into the Squeak window?

Again, I'm deeply grateful for the thoughtful responses that I've received
from all of you who wrote back to my initial mail. Thank you all very much,
and I'll get back to in a few days.

Jahanzeb Sherwani




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