Hi John,
Personally I think that each person is trying to get started in their own way. For programmers Sax and Dom are newbie activities. For others it might not be. I would be happy to help you with the newbie activities you are interested in. I had to look up Tamagotchi to know what it was, but it looks pretty interesting.
How far did you get writing your own Etoy Tamagotchi's? It would seem to me that Squeak and EToy's is a perfect platform for such an activity. I could point you to programming resources, or even Etoy resource, but not really knowing what you are looking for it's difficult to do. I don't know what you have already read or what getting started stuff you have tried. Have you already seen www.squeakland.org . There are some more advanced projects there. Also it would help to understand what level you are trying for. Are you looking to do programming, or sticking with Etoy scripts?
My feelings about the list so far is that there is much more bandwidth available then is being used. It doesn't seem to me that questions from a beginner programmer should be booted from the newbie list. What I would like to see are more simple questions so that everyone can get what they are looking for. So if you have a simple question like how can I get my Tamagotchi to act hungry when it's not fed, that would be cool. (Or even how can I turn my Tamagotchi green when it's fed too much!)
Happy coding!
Ron Teitelbaum President / Principal Software Engineer US Medical Record Specialists Ron@USMedRec.com
From: John Kershaw Sent: Saturday, July 01, 2006 4:53 AM Hi all,
As a newcomer to Squeak/eToys I've been searching for info on helping my 9-11 year olds write 'Tamagotchi' style simulations, since I've been unable to find a straight-forward manual. There's lots of 'Getting started' materials, but nothing on getting to the next level.
I signed up this 'Newbies' list but, to be honest, does parsing XMLs using the SAX or DOM models really fit into that category?
Can someone point me to resources for real (3-4 weeks experience) newbies?
John.
On 30/06/06, Ron Teitelbaum Ron@usmedrec.com wrote:
Cédrick,
The basic difference between SAX and DOM is that SAX is like a stream
that
as it is read provides information to you to build the objects you need, while DOM is more like a tree or object model that can be traversed like regular objects. They both have their advantages. The big advantage
for
SAX is in parsing large files. Since it acts like a stream you can
build
objects on the fly and not have to parse the entire file before getting
a
single object. DOM is much easier to use since it builds a tree for you that can be traversed.
For DOM to create an object you need to build your own object form the
data
that each node of the tree provides to you. The tree is a collection of collections with each item an XMLElement that can respond with queries
like
elementAt: #... you can iterate over the collection creating objects as
you
go.
For Sax you wait for a tag that indicates starting a new object then you create the object and for each element that comes after you add data to
your
object until you hit the end object tag.
If you are going to XML then you should learn both (which it seems you
are
doing). Good luck with it and feel free to let us know how you are
doing
with it. If you need more help let us know.
Ron Teitelbaum President / Principal Software Engineer US Medical Record Specialists Ron@USMedRec.com
Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
On 02/07/06, Ron Teitelbaum Ron@usmedrec.com wrote:
How far did you get writing your own Etoy Tamagotchi's?
For my own 'stay ahead of the kids' learning I modelled my own fish tank, based on my experiences of keeping fish for all of two months. What I've found (in real life) is that over-feeding has been the cause of most of my fishly 'deletions', so I tried to make 'water quality' the most important factor. In my 'simulation' uneaten food pollutes the water, and over-fed fish (heavier than 28g) pollute the water too. The fish's health is directly affected by the water quality.
So... I was about to upload a copy of my file so you could see where I'm at... and found I didn't know where Squeak was storing its files. After some searching I found my squarium here: ~/Library/Preferences/Squeak/Internet/My Squeak/Squeaklets/aquarium16.001.pr
Preferences should really only hold preferences - I don't know if anyone here can pass this on to the right people, but might I suggest that a better place for Squeak to store its user files would be something like: ~/Documents/My Squeak/aquarium16.001.pr
Anyhow, I've uploaded my aquarium file to the school website: http://bradfordchristianschool.com/Squeakland - see 'Mr Kershaw's aquarium' near the bottom
I also found some useful documentation links there - how ironic is that, since I created that page myself several weeks ago?
Also I can't seem to get the mime-type correct in my .htaccess file. I've tried numerous variations on this theme, but to no avail:
AddType application/x-squeak-object .pr
so for now you'll have to download my fish and run them locally.
Regards how far we've got with the kids' Tamagotchi's/pet shop animals, lesson one (last Friday) consisted of:
1. Draw your rabbit / guinea pig / snake / lizard
2. Create a 'thirst' variable. Drag its tile to below your pet. Set it to 0
3. Drag out a script, call it 'live'
4. Drag a 'thirst' assignment tile, set it to 'thirst, increase by, 1'. Start the ticker. Reduce to 1 execution per second
5. Add a test to the script: thirst > 900. If yes, rotate pet by 90
I have this idea of getting a single pet 'maintainable' (if thirsty drink water if available, click water to replenish when empty) then creating siblings with slight random variations in drinking patterns, and having to keep a whole pet shop fed & watered. Not sure how I'm going to get there, but that's half the fun of teaching, right - to stay ahead of the kids? ;)
Are there any pre-built conditional loops I could use on my scripts? The if-then-else structure is fine, but a bit limiting.
Any/all help appreciated,
John.
John,
Wow, it sounds like what you are doing is very creative and a whole lot of fun. And it sounds like you are having a lot of success modeling the world the way you see it. This to me is the biggest step in learning object oriented programming. You are still writing scripts, but there is a whole world of objects behind what you are doing that if you keep trying to find out more, I can guarantee you will be very pleased with.
There are a number of programmers that I've worked with that have really had a hard time understanding objects. They think in terms of processes and functions when what they really need to do is think of objects. Things like fish tank, water quality, food, air, fish waste ... With object oriented programming you can model each of these real life things as separate components that can really interact with each other. I'm impressed with what you understand intuitively. You are very lucky to have found a platform that can support what it is you are trying to accomplish, you will find that your ideas will not exceed the platforms capability.
To your question:
Are there any pre-built conditional loops I could use on my scripts? The if-then-else structure is fine, but a bit limiting.
It's important that you understand that you are working with tile programming. The structures available to you as tiles are more limited then what you can do with a browser. There is a menu button on your script which will show you the code that the tile is generating, and learning how to navigate the regular squeak environment and figure out what the messages are doing would be your first step. I'm not sure you are interested in going that route so if you are, please let me know and I will tell you more.
If you are comfortable with writing code in the script instead of using tiles then there are a number of more advanced control structures available, and I can help you with those if you like, please let me know. Also maybe someone that is more advanced in tile programming will help point you to other tile structures that I'm not aware of.
Keep at it! Happy coding!
Ron Teitelbaum President / Principal Software Engineer US Medical Record Specialists Ron@USMedRec.com
From: John Kershaw Sent: Sunday, July 02, 2006 4:46 AM
On 02/07/06, Ron Teitelbaum Ron@usmedrec.com wrote:
How far did you get writing your own Etoy Tamagotchi's?
For my own 'stay ahead of the kids' learning I modelled my own fish tank, based on my experiences of keeping fish for all of two months. What I've found (in real life) is that over-feeding has been the cause of most of my fishly 'deletions', so I tried to make 'water quality' the most important factor. In my 'simulation' uneaten food pollutes the water, and over-fed fish (heavier than 28g) pollute the water too. The fish's health is directly affected by the water quality.
So... I was about to upload a copy of my file so you could see where I'm at... and found I didn't know where Squeak was storing its files. After some searching I found my squarium here: ~/Library/Preferences/Squeak/Internet/My Squeak/Squeaklets/aquarium16.001.pr
Preferences should really only hold preferences - I don't know if anyone here can pass this on to the right people, but might I suggest that a better place for Squeak to store its user files would be something like: ~/Documents/My Squeak/aquarium16.001.pr
Anyhow, I've uploaded my aquarium file to the school website: http://bradfordchristianschool.com/Squeakland - see 'Mr Kershaw's aquarium' near the bottom
I also found some useful documentation links there - how ironic is that, since I created that page myself several weeks ago?
Also I can't seem to get the mime-type correct in my .htaccess file. I've tried numerous variations on this theme, but to no avail:
AddType application/x-squeak-object .pr
so for now you'll have to download my fish and run them locally.
Regards how far we've got with the kids' Tamagotchi's/pet shop animals, lesson one (last Friday) consisted of:
Draw your rabbit / guinea pig / snake / lizard
Create a 'thirst' variable. Drag its tile to below your pet. Set it to
0
Drag out a script, call it 'live'
Drag a 'thirst' assignment tile, set it to 'thirst, increase by,
1'. Start the ticker. Reduce to 1 execution per second
- Add a test to the script: thirst > 900. If yes, rotate pet by 90
I have this idea of getting a single pet 'maintainable' (if thirsty drink water if available, click water to replenish when empty) then creating siblings with slight random variations in drinking patterns, and having to keep a whole pet shop fed & watered. Not sure how I'm going to get there, but that's half the fun of teaching, right - to stay ahead of the kids? ;)
Are there any pre-built conditional loops I could use on my scripts? The if-then-else structure is fine, but a bit limiting.
Any/all help appreciated,
John. _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
Uhmm. To me, there are several kinds of newbie and my newbiness is more on computer science in general as I start to know squeak a bit. That's why I find more approriate to post general questions (like XML processing) here instead of the dev list where subjects are very sharp and where people will probably find trivial all sax and dom related problem and where I might have had a response like use a SAX parser and instead here I have more comprehensible response that can be used by others too (Also, I'd like to thanks you Ron for your time on this list on a lot of points ;) ).
I think here the difference mainly comes from the fact I use squeak as a dev envrionment without using etoys at all as all projects (.pr) stuff... and one other list may be too much ;)
see you
Cédrick
Hi John,
Personally I think that each person is trying to get started in their own way. For programmers Sax and Dom are newbie activities. For others it might not be. I would be happy to help you with the newbie activities you are interested in. I had to look up Tamagotchi to know what it was, but it looks pretty interesting.
beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org
-
cdrick -
John Kershaw -
Ron Teitelbaum