[Squeakland] EToys Experience Report

[Erik Nauman]

I think the ideal would be something like your list below but a little
more fleshed out for the classroom teacher audience. With more ideas
accompanied with the specific "how tos" it would be less time-consuming
for teachers, even those with plenty of tech (but minimal programming)
experience like myself, to go beyond the few tutorials offered on
squeakland. With more scaffolding more teachers would be able to push
their students beyond simple variations of the basics like your son
experienced at school. Another issue for me is that I tend to shy away
from using tutorials with my students (5-7th grade) because I want them
to be able to use their object-oriented experience to process content
they are learning in other disciplines. So I have to come up with the
content and "how to" myself. If you could post your own projects and
solutions to squeakland I think it would be invaluable, even the complex
projects you're working on as I think the squeak community is enormously
varied in programming experience. 

My question is can the current procedure on squeakland for submitting
and posting projects on the kids play section of the site include
accompanying tutorials? I think this would help lower the grade of the
squeak learning curve for all users.  
Thanks,
Erik Nauman
Middle School Technology Coordinator
The Hewitt School
212-994-2610
 

-----Original Message-----
From: squeakland-bounces at squeakland.org
[mailto:squeakland-bounces at squeakland.org] On Behalf Of Kevin Lawrence
Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2005 7:46 PM
To: squeakland at squeakland.org
Subject: [Squeakland] EToys Experience Report


Something like this

1. Drive a Car around a track
   HINT : follow the excellent tutorial

2. Salmon navigation
   HINT : draw the river as a gradient
   HINT : Watch the saturationUnder as you move your salmon around the
river
   HINT : store the previous saturation in a variable

3. Bouncing Basketballs
   HINT : add the acceleration to the forwardBy every tick

.....

14. Star-eating Snake
   HINT : Use the 'copy' message to gorw an extra body segment

...

27. Prisoner's Dilemma
   HINT : Store the history in a linked list

.....

38. Kepler's Law
   HINT : Think of a player as a vector