[squeakland] Etoys, is it difficult or easy?

[Carlos Rabassa]

Steve,

thank you very much for your comments.

Maybe I should write in big letters to have it always in front of me:

> The goal is to "win the person" not "win the argument".

But I´m not perfect and I´m nervous.

Many times in my life I won the argument and lost the person.


In the specific case of Uruguay and its Plan Ceibal it makes me nervous when I see a lot of very quiet happy people telling me not to worry,  that things don´t happen overnight,  that everything will take time.

My feeling is we don´t have all the time in the world.

In Uruguay,  and I heard the same of some other places as distant from us as Afghanistan,  the government support has been an essential factor in the progress made so far.

We don´t have to forget we have the fortune of living in a democracy.

Opposition is an essential element in any good democracy and it does exist in Uruguay.

When a politician aspires to win an election,  first thing he needs is a platform.

If I wanted to become the next president of Uruguay,  I would need a platform.

Looking around popular subjects being constantly discussed,  to include in my platform,  I would find nothing better than Plan Ceibal,  it is constantly in the news.

The current government supports Plan Ceibal.

So,  a good choice for me,  a new comer, would probably be to explain my position as contrary to Plan Ceibal and predict its failure.

Should I succeed,  the whole Plan Ceibal and all the progress already made would be in danger.


As far as Scratch, since you are the second or third person to mention it today,  let me tell you the only thing I know about it,  which is only my own personal experience.

In my first days as a volunteer,  I participated in some familiarization chats addressed to teachers, relatives and children who had never seen an XO computer because they haven´t been yet distributed in our area.

We had a few XO computers to let the audience try them.

First thing a lot of people did was to click on the attractive cat logo of Scratch.

For some reason it took al lot of time to load.

It took beyond the limit of patience of most members of our audience.

They started pressing all keys and clicking anywhere they could.

We had crashes and had to advice them the best thing to do was to shut off the computer,  start again and make sure they didn´t click on the cat again.

Then I decided they were too many programs in the XOs for me to try to learn them all at the same time.

For some reason I concentrated on TurtleArt,  I guess it was because it worked quite well with the emulator I was using at that time.

But then I found out I could run Etoys in my computer without any problems and,  that was the end of all the other programs as far as I was concerned.

Should I generalize from that personal experience?

Not at all.

That happened to me.

In great part what happened to me had to do with the fact that I don´t have an XO and I have almost never used WIndows.

Carlos Rabassa
Volunteer
Plan Ceibal Support Network
Montevideo, Uruguay



On Sep 8, 2010, at 12:19 PM, Steve Thomas wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Carlos Rabassa <carnen at mac.com> wrote:
> Every so often we hear someone saying Etoys is difficult.
> 
> So, my question then is How do we respond? 
> Some possible responses:
> Say nothing.
> Well Scracth has a lower floor but also a lower ceiling and Etoys has a much higher ceiling (which to most people sounds like Charlie Brown's teacher talking "wa wa, wawa, wa wa", if you don't get the cultural reference, in the Peanut's cartoons Charlie Brown, aka Carlitos and Snoopy en espanol, the adults were never seen, you only heard a teacher speaking in completely unintelligible sounds)
> Well as soon as we get $100 million in funding we will design a new interface that will blow your socks off.
> Really I found it quite easy (implication, you are calling the person an idiot, not a recommended approach). The sad truth is I have said this. Not in these words, but in saying something like, I was able to teach this to my 8 year old in 30 minutes and they learned it all on their own with very little help.  While the above statement was true and a valid point, it did not "win the person" and most likely put them on the defensive.
> "Really, I have heard that comment from one or two others, but I have also heard others say once they spent a little time learning, it was rather easy.  If you like we could sit down together for 10 minutes and I can show you how to get started and you can create your own book in Etoys. Or I could point you to some good tutorials/screencasts that only take 10 minutes of your time. (Of course we need to have these first).
> The goal is to "win the person" not "win the argument".
> 
> Stephen
> 

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