[Squeakland] EToys Experience Report

[Kim Rose]

Hi, Erik, Kevin, others -

We'd love to post projects done by others on to Squeakland!  We are 
preparing to announce a new section on Squeakland called "Project of 
the Month" where we will feature an etoy as well as documentation for 
that project.  We also want to include some pedagogy behind the 
project and an accompanying "off computer activity" as well, if 
possible.

As you know writing tutorials and documentation is quite time 
consuming (before BJ Conn and I wrote the "Powerful Ideas in the 
Classroom" book we tested the projects in her classroom for 3 years 
and *then* we took a year to write the book(!)).

This said, we welcome projects from you, Erik, and others which we'd 
love to feature as a "project of the month". We will announce this in 
just  a few days as well as provide an email address where you can 
submit projects suitable for sharing.

We certainly want to build on the body of examples available; and we 
want to grow the examples so they are not only suitable for 9-11 year 
olds, but for older students as well.   For older students, as Kevin 
pointed,  out and we well know, additional features are quite 
necessary and we're working hard to get those built into the next 
"evolution" of the system.

I hope you can join us in August, at SqueakFest '05,  in Chicago,  to 
share more about what you've done with your middle schoolers, provide 
more input, etc.

thanks,
Kim

At 8:51 AM -0500 3/23/05, Erik Nauman wrote:
>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
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Squeakland mailing list
>Squeakland at squeakland.org
>http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland