[squeakland] Learnable Programming
mokurai at earthtreasury.org
mokurai at earthtreasury.org
Wed Nov 7 14:00:56 EST 2012
Bookmarked to use in the Etoys Reference Manual. Thanks.
I took off a few days for the election, but will be back on the manual as
soon as I clear out this e-mail backlog. It is going quite well, although
there are a few niggles, and I have reported a number of bugs in Etoys,
some of them serious.
I am starting to plan out a companion Etoys by Example, which will include
dissections and annotations of the projects provided with Etoys v5, and a
variety of extensions. I was particularly pleased to see the fractions
project, which has endless potential for further development.
I have had a notion of using Etoys to write OERs (Open Educational
Resources) to replace textbooks (see link in sig). I can see the outlines
of an architecture for this, but I need help to understand and explain how
to construct interactive books such as some of the projects use.
I have mentioned the need for an extensive proofreading and refactoring of
Etoys, plus writing of many more comments on classes and methods. Who is
working on such things?
On Tue, November 6, 2012 3:58 pm, karl ramberg wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 6:30 PM, karl ramberg <karlramberg at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 6:45 AM, Steve Thomas <sthomas1 at gosargon.com>
>> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 6:24 AM, Bert Freudenberg
>>> <bert at freudenbergs.de>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Great essay by Bret Victor on "Designing a programming system for
>>>> understanding programs":
>>>>
>>>> http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
>>>>
>>>> He clearly explains what makes a programming system "learnable". While
>>>> Etoys does not do all of it, many of its features fit right in, in
>>>> particular as compared to other widely used programming systems. An
>>>> Etoys
>>>> project can be always running, changes have effect immediately, all
>>>> state is
>>>> visible (through the readouts in viewers) and most of the state can be
>>>> changed directly (e.g. by dragging up and down the number arrows),
>>>> tiles
>>>> have default arguments so they do something useful immediately, there
>>>> is an
>>>> explanation (balloon help) for each tile
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes but it is only textual help. It would be great if they could be a
>>> combination of Ricardo's Speech Bubbles and Ted Kaehler's roll your own
>>> quick guide feature. With one or two changes, the roll your own quick
>>> guides should be in a folder in the Etoys directory so it is easier for
>>> students and teachers to find and save these guides. The current
>>> location
>>> is hard to find, I believe varies by platform and can be locked down by
>>> school administrators. Also when saving a "My Quick Guides" area
>>> would be
>>> nice. Perhaps even encourage folks to modify them by having the New
>>> Help/Speech Bubbles have a "Modify Me" icon, which would open a new
>>> project
>>> with the existing Help/Speech Bubble opened. We should also have a
>>> mechanism to revert to the original so kids can easily experiment
>>> without
>>> fear of messing things up too badly.
>>>
>>>
>>>> , etc. And maybe this essay inspires some improvements to Etoys :)
>>>
>>>
>>> I currently have the two key take aways so far as it relates to
>>> improvements
>>> to make in Etoys:
>>>
>>> "Create by Abstracting"
>>> "Recomposition"
>>>
>>> "Create by Abstracting": I believe the tools are already there, but
>>> what is
>>> needed is the "Great Literature" and Lessons teachers and learners can
>>> use.
>>> Not sure how this would impact the interface or if it should, but I
>>> think
>>> its a really important lesson. One possible way this could impact
>>> interface
>>> design is to provide a "turn #/expression into a variable" function.
>>> Where
>>> there is a way to click/touch on a variable and have a easily
>>> discoverable/accesible method to turn it into a variable. Actually it
>>> should work for "players/objects/morphs/colors" as well.
>>> Also kudo's to Etoys and its copy/sibling approach which IMO is a
>>> better
>>> design for "Start with one, make many" than the one for text based
>>> languages
>>> demonstrated by Brett.
>>>
>>> "Recomposition": object re-use (across projects) is not very simple in
>>> Etoys. I like Scratch 2.0's use of a Backpack, which yes could be
>>> implemented as "add your own" section in the Object Catalog, but I
>>> think
>>> they made a good design choice in making it an "always there and
>>> visible"
>>> flap.
>>>
>>> Regarding "Decomposition" Brett states
>>>>
>>>> "Consider a programmer who has made a bouncing ball animation. How
>>>> does
>>>> she go from one ball to two, to a hundred? How does she make the balls
>>>> bounce off one another? How does she make balls draggable with the
>>>> mouse? In
>>>> a genuine learning environment such as Etoys, this progression is
>>>> natural
>>>> and encouraged."
>>>
>>>
>>> My suggestions here is that it would be good if Etoys "scaled better"
>>> when
>>> executing scripts on multiple objects. Unless you are using Kedama
>>> (which
>>> rocks in this aspect) Etoys slows down when you have say 20+ objects
>>> executing.
>>>
>>> Okay, so that brings me to another area for improvement Kedama. Kedama
>>> is
>>> amazing and definitely rocks at massively parallel simulations, But it
>>> either needs a better (read easier to understand/grok) set of scripting
>>> tiles or I need a better model in my head of how it works. Probably
>>> more of
>>> the latter than the former.
>>
>> I found this searching a while ago
>> http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~sassa/lab/papers-written/ohshima-phdthesis-070109.pdf
>> I have not read it yet.
>
>
> I skimmed through this and it seems the Etoy user aspects of Kedama is
> described in chapter 3 and 4.
> I must say Kedama got a lot more understandable reading these chapters :-)
> Maybe we could extract the and post them on Squeakland ?
>
> Also some chapters have info for the Etoys reference manual eg the
> Etoys language extensions and the features.
>
> Yoshiki:
> Is it ok to use/copy from the thesis to the Etoys reference manual and
> eventually to a brief Kedama user guide ?
>
> Karl
>
>
>
>
>>
>> Karl
>>>
>>> Of course all of the above would be great if we had more development
>>> resources :)
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Stephen
>>>
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--
Edward Mokurai
(默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج)
Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks
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