[Squeakland] Lack of documentation frustrating

Marta Voelcker marta at pensamentodigital.org.br
Sat May 26 16:41:43 PDT 2007


Hi,

about thinking on being an object:

I have three children( 14, 12 , 8).
I got motivated to learn squeak (besides thinking on telecenters and schools programs) specialy to use it with my 12 Years old son, that love to play other games on the computer ( I wanted him to create games instead of just consume them!)

I still did not suceeded with the 12 years old boy. The 8 years old bot loves create and play with cars, but guess what, the 14 years old girl is using squeak to plan the coreography of the dance that her class is going to present in the "Panamerican Games inside the school" each class is a country and they compete in sports and cultural activities... Well she dances since she was 4, so she is leading this dance activity in her class. 

We just started to do it in squeak, but she is planning to teach her classmetes to use squeak, so they can suggest different movements for the coreography. 

Children are always surprising us!

Marta





 Sat, 26 May 2007 11:22:19 +0200, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> escreveu:

> 
> On May 26, 2007, at 0:49 , mstram wrote:
> 
> >
> > Alan,
> >
> >
> > Alan Kay wrote:
> >>
> >> Let's see, Oct 31st 2006 to May 25th 2007 seems to be 7 months,  
> >> not 18 ...
> >>
> >
> > Sorry, Never was great at math ;)
> >
> > As I mentioned in another message, I was playing with an animation  
> > tutorial
> > that uses the "holder" morph.  Well I've searched through this  
> > forum and the
> > wiki and still haven't found anything that documents what a  
> > "holder" does or
> > the fields that are exposed by it's viewer.
> >
> > I've also been looking at some of the examples on
> > http://community.ofset.org/,
> > and trying to use Google translate to figure out what's going on  
> > with the
> > examples.
> >
> > E.g. how to coordinate multiple scripts for multiple characters in an
> > animation or simulation.
> >
> > I assume that I can create a 'master' script and then use something  
> > like :
> >
> > ==================
> > "Master Script"
> >
> >   currenTime >= nextEventTime ifTrue: [
> >
> >                 Character1_script : start_ticking  (or whatever the  
> > "magic
> > word would be)
> >
> > ======
> >
> > (The logic above is very incomplete .. I'd want to choose from an  
> > array of
> > characters /classes, what I'm looking for is what is the message to  
> > "start
> > ticking" to a "tickable" script ;)
> 
> I have the impression you are approaching Etoys from the wrong angle.  
> It's not about "scripting" or even "programming" in the popular sense.
> 
> It's about working with objects. Imagine what you would do if you  
> were that object - how would you know it's your time to do something?  
> Trying to implement a centrally controlled event-trigger system in  
> etoys is certainly possible (there is no formal proof but it's  
> obviously Turing-complete) but you are working against the system  
> than within.
> 
> That object-centric perspective was perhaps best understandable with  
> Papert's *mechanical* turtles that you controlled. These original  
> turtles were not just images on the screen with an x and y position.  
> Or worse, colors in a 2D grid, or even numbers in an array called  
> frame buffer. They were actual objects that you could touch and  
> instruct.
> 
> In Etoys it's the same - you create an object and describe its  
> behavior. When you reference other objects in a script, it's  
> generally good practice to just observe what they do, rather than  
> make them do something.
> 
> We recently added the option to hide the receiver tile in each line  
> of a script to make the distinction between "me" and "other" objects  
> more obvious. Otherwise it's too tempting to have one large central  
> script that controls the behavior of all objects (which is what  
> people previously exposed to "programming" often try to do).
> 
> So try to rethink your problem if all you had at your disposal where  
> independent agents that behave on their own. You may be surprised at  
> what the result will look like :)
> 
> - Bert -
> 
> 
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> 
> 


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