Squeak ideas for a classroom/clubhouse

Jahanzeb Sherwani jahanzeb at lums.edu.pk
Wed Jan 15 11:16:41 PST 2003


>Michael said:
>There are different forms of tiles, which makes it even a little more 
>confusing.
>All the tiles that describe actions, e.g., turn by, forward, create a 
>script when dropped. Others, which only make sense in a certain context 
>*in* a script do not.
>Examples for these are tests ("color sees", isUnderMouse) which need a 
>test tile to be dropped into and instance variables like "Sketch's x", 
>which belong into a value field (as in an assigment or other expression) 
>inside a script.

I forgot to mention, I was demonstrating the "forward by" and "turn by"
tiles only, and these same tiles on some PCs were making scripts, and on
others were not. Just an idea though, would it make it easier for kids if
the different types of tiles were color coded? Things like "sketch's x"
which can be used either as variables or as test conditions could then be
coded differently as well.

>Alan said:
>The other problem that needs to be solved and fixed is when to do 
>something when tiles are dropped. I think what is happening to you is 
>that you might be dropping tiles somewhere other than the desktop 
>and the system is not reacting to this. At an earlier point in etoys 
>all drops did the same thing and this was changed (I can't remember 
>just why). Another example is that playfields are now made sticky and 
>can't be picked up directly with the mouse because children would 
>often miss when trying to touch something in the playfield and would 
>pick it up instead. However, this means that playfields can only be 
>moved with the black and brown handles, and this is yet another rule 
>to be learned (amongst too many rules already).

Yes, this sounds like it might be what was happening -- unless it's not
detecting the drops within the desktop either. This brings me to another
difficulty I was having. There are some rare occasions when it doesn't
detect the mouse hovering a valid tile over a part in a script. For
instance, I had three test tiles, each with a 'color sees' test condition,
which would make the car turn or go forward. When I moved the third color
sees out of the script and tried to put it back, it wouldn't give me a
green hovering signal when I'd put the mouse above it. What ended up
working was moving the other two test blocks out of the script, putting the
'color sees' tile in the test condition for the remaining test block, and
dragging the other two test blocks in. I tried this again and the error
isn't happening. I'll try to note down the exact conditions under which
these things happen the next time they do in case it helps. The next time
I'm in the school (tomorrow) I'll try to replicate what we were doing the
last time this happened.

We're trying to create a pool of examples that the kids can browse through
themselves to see different things happening (animation, control, feedback)
etc. and I was wondering what the easiest way is to understand how
different morphs work. For instance, I saw a B3D sphere which was
texture-mapped with an earth image and was rotating, which looked quite
cool, but couldn't figure out how to get into the workings of what was
going on. Could you tell me how the kids (or I) can reverse engineer a
project to see how, say, one makes ?

Jahanzeb




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