[squeakland] Re: the Roulette Project

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

At Wed, 3 Feb 2010 19:53:09 +0000,
David Corking wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jan 22 Yoshiki Ohshima  wrote:
> >  Hehe, my version of Roulette is available at:
> >
> > http://dev.laptop.org/~yoshiki/etoys/Roulette.005.pr
> ....
> > A painting with a bit of tools and
> > just one script with one line (and tick rate change) to make a
> > sufficiently engaging project for 6 years old.
> ...
> This is beautifully simple.
> 
> Do you recall any more detail about this, or have Mr. Yokoyama's presentation?

  Hmm, there used to be the blog (and IIRC, presentation materials and
possibly recording were there, too) at the site of Interactive Arts
and Media department of Columbia College of Chicago, but apparently
they took it down and I couldn't find the page in the archive.org.

> For example, was this project made by a six year old?  What activities
> will be done with it?

  I can't give the answer from first hand experience, but guessing
from what I heard, it is 6th graders try making it/them together with
1st graders (6 years old), or 6th graders made it/them and let the 1st
graders play with them and extend together.

The Saturday workshop has a blog BTW:
http://saturday-squeak.blogspot.com/

> Some ideas might be:
> Guess a number and see if it stops at your number.
> Get points when it lands on a number, then add the points of
> successive spins with pencil and paper
> Am I on the right track?  Is there more?

These are good!  The original version and a version by Abe-san
(http://squeakland.jp/seaside/SBSuperSwiki/86bea02b-e6a2-492e-abbe-0b078659f0e7)
had points.

  You can put stars/numbers in some distribution and put different
scores for them, and try to see the resulting distribution; Try
different "turn by" values and see if the resulting distribution
(after certain large number of trial) changes or not.  The law of
large numbers is a good thing teach, so you can have many kids do the
trial 10 times each and sum the results up to get the sense of
distribution variation for small number of trials and large number of
trials.  Instead of ticking the script, you put different value to the
"turn by" script and see how many times you have to execute the script
to get the one full rotation. Also for the Etoys' front, change the
arrow's rotation center and make it rotate instead of the board;
extend the script so when you press a button the rotation slows down
instead of abrupt stop; put a color sees tile for the arrow and
automatically display the score when it stops.  etc., etc.

  Thank you!

-- Yoshiki