[Squeakland] Car race - dual tracks, timing,etc..

[Herb Schilling]

Hi,

  Just wanted to share something that I came up with. I am new to 
Squeak so don't expect much! I really only know the EToys way of 
doing things.

  This is building on the track following car tutorials I have seen 
elsewhere. I wanted to let the students design their track following 
algorithms and then have races between two cards at a time. The 
project that I created has:

	- two identical tracks
	- "boundaries" that, if you hit them with our car, puts you 
out of the race
	- timers for both races
	- buttons to put the cars "on mark", to start them, and to stop them
	- two cars with drive "drive" methods. ( The races are 
started by sending the
		cars a "drive" message )

I am going to use Squeak's collaborative tools ( badges ) to let the 
students send me their cars so that I can race them on my machine 
that has a projector attached to it. We are going to have a real 
competition with prizes. We will be using this project next week.


Right now the way to tell the project which cars are in the race is a 
little awkward. You have to drag a car's tile to the setCarOne or 
setCarTwo scripts that are left open on the desktop. Then you have to 
click the "run this script once" button. I wish there were a way to 
drag and drop a car onto a button or morph and have that set the car 
assign to a race. I don't know how to do that.


One thing I wanted to add was some kind of variability to the race 
events. The students get the same kind of track project to test out 
their cars so they will have a very good idea how fast they can 
complete the race. Maybe I could add some random "wind" that slightly 
perturbs the cars as they drive.

I also would like a way to make sure all the car drive methods have 
the same ticks per second. I know I can do that manually but that's 
no fun.

Here is the project:

	http://explorersposts.grc.nasa.gov/post631/advisors/squeak/Car%20Race.006.pr


-- 
Herb Schilling
NASA Glenn Research Center
Brook Park, OH 44135
hschilling at nasa.gov

We cannot solve our problems from the same state of consciousness 
that created them. - Albert Einstein