[squeakland] education meeting, November 14

[Rita Freudenberg]

Hi everyone,

here come the meeting notes from last weeks education meeting. I intend to pick up and send our notes to this list regularly. We had our meetings all the time, and you are invited to join us on Thursdays at 9:30 PST / 12:30 EST in our google hangout. Just let me know!


Greetings,
Rita

education meeting November, 14, 2013

Kathleen, Avigail, Randy, Rita

- I did send the email around from Yoshiki about what needs to be done to get Etoys running on the Chromebook. Chromebooks are used widely in Illinois and word is out that the new assessments for schools are going to Chromebooks, that means many schools will buy these devices. Now we need to find someone who will do the coding. At the moment, there is no money to spend, but the team at EtoysIllinois is working to get some funding. We will post this to the developers lists to see who would be able to do it.

- I will be going to FETC in Orlando in January and visit Wilmington on my way. I hope to get our contacts renewed and now with so many teachers using Etoys in Illinois, it would be great if the groups could work closer together.

- Then we discussed ideas on what we would like to see in a new Etoys, or any new learning system. 
#1 A feedback system, that helps students who get stuck and gives hints to keep going. It also should notify teachers which student would need help. Generally, the teacher should be able to tailor the system according to their needs. 

#2 Collaboration between students, like Nebraska, where objects can be shared and students can drag objects around to other screens.

#3 Easy ways of sharing objects, not just whole projects. 

#4 Improve the feedback when errors occur.

#5 Undo button, or generally easy ways to go back to earlier stages of a project.

#6 There once was a 3D-rendering, it would be great to have 3D objects to script. 

#7 Improve the look-and-feel, perhaps get inspirations from the Jive-design.

- We are planning to create an Etoys course on the new open course platform mooc.org, which will open in the first half of 2014 (due to their website). So we have time to plan the outline of the course, discuss contents and create materials, and then we'll see what functionality the mooc site will have. We will all think about how to start the course, what the first lesson could be and I'm curious to see how different our approaches will be :) Everyone is invited to participate and I hope we can offer the course in different languages!
Rita Freudenberg
rita at isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de