[Squeakland] Multiple copies of pen trails

[Andreas Raab]

Hi Phil,

Almost right ;-) What you want to do is to prepare everything up to the
point where you have the transparent playfield (so you see the pattern of
dots appear through it). Then, paint the arrow you want to use for
connecting the dots, set its pen trail options accordingly (pen down, arrow
heads etc) and put it *into* the book so that it appears in the right place
on top of the dots (but in the book!).

Now comes the magic: In the books 'red halo menu' there is a submenu called
'book' and here is an entry 'save as new-page prototype'. Select this item
(sorry, no feedback). Now click on the top-right button in the book to get
"more controls" for it. When you then hit the "+" button you will get a new
blank page with the only thing being the arrow you've drawn. You can
navigate through all your pages using the "<" and ">" button and you will
see each drawing you have made. So each time you hit the "+" you will have a
new page which you can make some drawing on (and if things go horribly wrong
you can delete it using the "-").

Keep in mind though that there's one big gotcha here if you're going to use
this technique. When you go to another page, the viewer will still show the
object from the last page you were on. This can *very* easily get extremely
confusing as you never know which page your arrow will be running along (I
just tried and it confused me like hell). I think it might be better to have
only a fixed number of pages and different "arrows" for each of them (using
colors or different shapes) so that it is easy for the kids to differentiate
between them (easy to do: just set up everything like I said in the above,
then make up new pages and redraw the arrow by just filling it with a
different color; finally get rid of the extra controls by pressing the top
right button in the book again).

As for 'saving the drawings', there is a simple technique which might be
useful. You can save any object as either jpeg, bmp, or gif file by going
into the red halo menu and, in the 'export' menu choose the appropriate
image type. Now this is a bit bothersome if you want to do it often, but
here's an easy way to automate it: 

Go into the viewer of the playfield holding the pen trails and into its
'miscellaneous' category. You will find something saying 
	playfield do menu item 'send to back'.
Change the 'send to back' into 'GIF file' (yeah, this looks awkward but it
needs to be the exact wording from the menu) and press enter to accept it.
Now press the "fire" button. You should be prompted with the name for the
GIF file and when you enter and accept it, your playfield will have been
written to the image file. 

Okay, now drag the command into the world to make a new script. Rename this
script to 'makeGif' or similar. Then, in the viewer go into the 'scripts'
category and click on the menu icon right next to the 'makeGif' script. Ask
it to  hand you a 'button to fire this script' and place it somewhere in the
world. Close (not destroy!) both the 'makeGif' script as well as the viewer
and you have a perfect little button which will make a snapshot of your
playfield whenever you ask it to.

Hope this helps,
  - Andreas

> -----Original Message-----
> From: squeakland-bounces at squeakland.org 
> [mailto:squeakland-bounces at squeakland.org] On Behalf Of Phil 
> Firsenbaum
> Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 4:07 PM
> To: Kim Rose
> Cc: squeakland at squeakland.org
> Subject: [Squeakland] Multiple copies of pen trails
> 
> 
> Kim,
> Stuck again!
> I'm working on a little project which has to do with 
> exploring patterns 
> in nature. It's based on a terrific book I found in the 
> library(Patterns in Nature by Peter Stevens).
> Initially, I want kids to be able to explore the various ways of 
> connecting the dots you see below. They've got to connect all 
> the dots 
> (using Arrowhead) so that they all link up with the center 
> dot and any 
> two dots connect along only one path. It turns out that there are 
> various ways of accomplishing this and the different patterns 
> that are 
> created have different geometrical attributes.
> I had the opportunity to work with a (5th grade) class yesterday on 
> this project and the results were interesting...kids were fascinated 
> and most seemed really engaged.
> What I'd like to do next is somehow have multiple copies of 
> the pattern 
> of dots appear so that kids could have more than one attempt at 
> connecting the dots without erasing previous versions. I've tried 
> putting a (transparent) book on top of the pattern, but that doesn't 
> allow me to have different versions on each page. I'll even 
> settle for 
> being able to capture each version (as an exported graphic) but that 
> doesn't seem to work either. If I export the playfield that I'm using 
> below the pattern of dots isn't captured!
> Any ideas/suggestions?
> 
> Phil
> 
>