[squeakland] [IAEP] Why is Scratch more popular than Etoys?

[karl ramberg]

On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 3:20 PM, K. K. Subramaniam <kksubbu.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday 16 Sep 2011 3:06:34 AM karl ramberg wrote:
>> I also looked at these two web forum pages discussing programming for
>> kids pages today but not much love for Etoys:
>>
>> http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/169225.html
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/kgbzq/why_we_should_teach_our_
>> kids_to_code/
>>
>> There seems to be a mismatch from we perceive as values and strong
>> features of Etoys and what other people see.  Why do we not get the
>> ideas out? What makes is so hard ? Do people test Etoys and drop it ?
> Etoys requires people to think hard before putting ideas onto a project. This
> raises the barrier for students and journalists working against a deadline
> ;-).
>
> Another aspect of Etoys will become apparent if you get kids to use Etoys in a
> language foreign to them (or say in dingbat fonts). Though the UI is graphical
> it still has a heavy text bias. I noticed this when helping children,
> illiterate in English, use Etoys. Painting lacks the directness of other
> Morphic ops like move, pickup etc. Beginners tend to the leave the Paint Tool
> on while saving their project. We could do more in simplifying the UI. For
> instance, compose sketches by long-pressing (embed) one Morph on another.
> Suzanne Guyader, author of Art and Etoys, had many nice ideas for easing
> compositions.
>
> What Alan proposed about going beyond Scratch and Etoys in an earlier mail
> rings true from my own experience. I would throw in Tuxpaint into the mix.
> Tuxpaint uses sounds very well. We need something that takes the best parts of
> Etoys, Scratch and Tuxpaint and build a new Idea editor.
>
A few thoughts

My kids play The Sims 3 and Starcraft 2. The interfaces
there are quite complex and the result is a kind of programming.
It would be interesting to see if one could take these concepts a bit
longer and
make programming tools more game-like.

Maybe there could be "clip art" of ready players that give the novice less
digressions.

It would be cool to get better scaling and higher speed than Etoys, to
be able to collapse players down into
each other to build complex players.
It would be great to be able to build for example make a decoder for a
video stream or a image form.

It's also hard now to share single players.

Debugging and  to be able to step trough scripts would be very good.

Better tools for locking down the interface would be nice. Authoring
would still be possible, but
presentation would also be possible with fewer mishaps and accidental
breakage of the carefully set up
project.

It is hard to discuss tile scripts in mail lists text based forums.
Screenshots are cumbersome and often a hassle.
Scratch forums had some style scripts I think that made code render like tiles.
I'm not sure how to deal with this issue.
Maybe the discussion forums should be integrated into the programming
environment ?

+ much more :-)

Cheers,
Karl


> But then, we need to be able to look beyond software at the larger goal. The
> real question we should be asking is "Why aren't children acquiring fluency in
> learning with Etoys/Scratch/TuxPaint or whatchamacallit?"
>
> Regards .. Subbu
>