[squeakland] Learnable Programming
karl ramberg
karlramberg at gmail.com
Wed Nov 7 15:18:20 EST 2012
On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 8:00 PM, <mokurai at earthtreasury.org> wrote:
> 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.
Ask away, There are many people here that can help you here.
>
> 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?
I do this as far as I have ability to.
Refactorings is a long process, as one have to grasp the much of
system and reformulate it in
a more concise way. Often the complexity is mindnumbing ;-)
Proofreading should be quite easy,
You can post issues on http://tracker.squeakland.org/
Presented in this form it is quite fast for developers to fix:
http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ-1036
An other possibility is that you do the fixes yourself and upload
them. It's a few tools that needs to be
mastered to be able to do that but I assure you that it is quite fun :-)
A very very brief document is posted here on how to develop for Etoys:
http://etoys.squeak.org/svn/trunk/Documentation/Developer-HowTo.txt
Karl
>
> 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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