[Squeakland] notes from education team meeting

[Rita Freudenberg]

Hi all,

we had our last education team meeting yesterday. Here are the notes:
http://wiki.squeakland.org/display/sq/2009/06/18/education+team+meeting+June%2C+18

You can find the older notes here:
http://wiki.squeakland.org/pages/viewrecentblogposts.action?key=sq

Feel free to discuss and comment!

Greetings,
Rita

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education team meeting June, 18
participants: Randy, Marta, Tim, Rita

Tim told us about the pilot project that has started in Haiti on monday, 
June 8. There are not just kids, but also teachers attending the Etoys 
workshops, who can then teach other teachers. Tim has been contacted by 
OLPC Philippines, they will use Etoys there.

For the Etoys courseware a very important thing is to get a template, so 
that we can ask others to help developing it. The outline for the basic 
unit is 1. sketches
2. halos
3. viewers
4. scripts
5. books
6. variables
7. animation
8. supplies
9. tests
10. exploring

Randy has started with units about physical motion, they are based on a 
story, because that's a good way for children to learn things. He did 
send the projects to the education team to get feedback. On the outline 
for the lessons we say that each lessons should be 1 hour long, but 
that's not easy to do, some topics are more complicated than others. But 
than you don't have to spend all the time on the computer, with some 
topics we could provide ideas for classroom discussions etc. So for 
shorter lessons there is space for related things.

Marta said she has volunteers who could help us with the course material 
once we have the template done. They can help with translations, too.

Randy mentionend the "big ideas" behind the different sciences covered 
in school, that we should have in mind when developing course material:

physical science - model and scale
life science - system
earth science - cycle

Tim asked Marta if the name "Etoys To Go" for Etoys on a flash drive 
would be ok in Brazil, Marta said it is.
Then he told us, that usb drives are noticeably cheaper with less 
memory, so maybe we should have "Etoys To Go for Windows", "Etoys To Go 
for Linux" etc. Most people would know which OS they would need. We will 
see how much memory the Etoys To Go will actually need.

Tim suggested to DVDs with screencasts of the course material for 
Squeakfest.

Marta told us about a problem of Etoys with a brazilian linux version, 
it isn't working. She will provide a link for the software team, that 
they can have a look at it. The government is providing more laptops to 
schools and teachers from that schools are coming to Squeakfest and of 
course would like to use Etoys.

Tim brought up the idea of two new mailing lists: one for teacher and 
one for technical things. The reason to split would be not to bore 
teachers with technical details. Rita said, that developers often 
discuss topics relevant for teachers, additional features or changes 
will affect their work. Since there is not that much traffic on the 
squeakland list, there is no urgent need to split soon. The main list 
should be education-focused and hopefully developers will not discuss 
deep-down technical details there, that should be on a separate list. 
But generally issues should be talked about on the squeakland list, 
hopefully in a way that doesn't scares the teachers away.

Randy was impressed by the Etoys video with the MCU interface that has 
been sent today on the list. He proposed to have a lesson using hardware 
in the course ware.

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-- 
Rita Freudenberg
Squeakland Foundation
http://www.squeakland.org