[Squeakland] workshop feedback

[Randy Heiland]

Just had another fun Squeak workshop for a troop of 6th grade girls at the
Girl Scout computer lab last night.  Thought I'd provide a bit of feedback
for the dev team...
1) as I said, it was a lot of fun once again - thanks for Squeak/eToys!

2) the most common pitfall they had was using/placing the Test block in a
script.  The usual situation was that they didn't wait for a "green
drop-it-here" slot to open before dropping and would just butt it up against
the bottom of the script.  Then, when I told them that it wasn't really
inside the script, they would grab it - usually at the bottom-right corner,
and try to put it in the script again.  But of course the green drop-it-here
slot is triggered by the mouse cursor, which means they would have to drag
the Test block much higher than is intuitive.  After later playing around
with this very situation a bit more, I wonder if it would be better to have
a Test block *only* be pickable/draggable from its upper-left corner and
have some little colored glyph in that corner to indicate so.  Since the
Test block is sort of a different beast than the other tiles in a Viewer, it
might be OK to have a different UI to dragging it?  Just a thought.

3) the other problem encountered more than once was when someone would start
out by drawing a very large sketch, keep it, scale it down, drag it over
near the (right or bottom) edge of the world, repaint it -- then, oops, it's
off the screen - and if I go ahead and repaint/keep it, it comes back
cropped.

4) once again I had a parent asking "if I download Squeak on our home
computer, will it infect it with viruses or allow annoying popups, etc" - as
they had happen with other "educational software".  I share this only in
order to ask whether you think it's worth putting some sort of assurance
statement on the Squeakland site?

--Randy