However ...Re: [Squeakland] Panel discussion: Can the AmericanMind be Opened?

[Tony Forster]

> It would be interesting to
> add more representations to Etoys, such as tally charts, rods, an
> abacus, tesselating shapes, liquids: to see if they help children
> become fluent in logarithms, polynomials, statistics, complex numbers
> .......... like fluid mechanics, statistical mechanics,
> Shrodinger's cat, cellular automata, developmental biology .....

The higher level representations above should not be added to Etoys but the 
primitives with which they can be created should all be there. See 
http://schoolgamemaker.rupert.id.au/samples3/ for examples of the kind of 
things referred to above. They would be very hard to create in Etoys because 
many of the primitives are missing. There are very few script trigger 
events, eg no collision triggers, and no bounce action to name but a few 
primitives which would make programming so much easier.

For the kinds of things you might want to be able to implement in Etoys see

http://curvebank.calstatela.edu/home/home.htm
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/topics/AnimatedGIFs.html
http://www.fi.uu.nl/wisweb/

Tony