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Hi all and Bill,
Thanks for your elaborations and thoughts. The talk about Universals/Non-universals is aldo one of the most interesting ones I had the opportunity to read. Here are some comments.
Bill Kerr wrote:
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I sort of agree with this approach but am also torn. Game Maker is unashamedly populist, the focus is absolutely clear from its name. So kids end up programming on an inferior platform - no morphic, no late binding, Windows only, proprietary code. It would be nice if more young people spontaneously picked up on etoys / squeak, that it could generate that sort of appeal. The way kids view school these days to promote something as "educational" is almost the kiss of death!!
Your words reminds me about a chapter of The Simpsons, where Bart was destroying cities in a video game, and the game said of which state the city was the capital. After a while and in despite of the violence, Bart realized that it was and "educative game", so he drop it. Playing is a powerful way to learn and games and toys (or using/building them as in the approach of GameMaker or Squeak, respectively) are engaging for most of the students. We "intuitively" know if the game/toy is fine, so we can use the link between intuition and the things that we want to teach in a emotional and cognitive sense. But is also true that games, science and art exist for their own sake and there is and intrinsic pleasure and beauty in "making/playing" them. So my main question is how can use The Link to get people becoming part of a community of practice (the one which makes Science, Art or even games) in a way that people develop the aesthetics and epistemologies of their communities in the process of belonging and participate in them.This other link between community and the individual is important to me because at some point, when passion is legitimate it exceed the individual and reach the culture (the other way is also true).
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I would see Etoys / Squeak as more powerful than either Scratch or Game Maker. I wouldn't see young students moving over from Etoys to Scratch as a step upwards, it seems more like a step backwards to me.
I like the low entry, high ceiling approach. You don't need the high ceiling for all students but in any group a small proportion of hackers emerges, say 5%, which does need the high ceiling. One aim ought to be to encourage that advanced group, one thing they do is drag the general level upwards
For the students I teach (secondary) the quality of their sprites is very important. I have seen them abandon their game making projects simply because they couldn't find the sprites they wanted on the web.
I was using Scratch as a beginning of the programming part this semester instead of Etoys in my course of Introduction to Informatics (for first semester undergraduate students) and because of the clean and explicit interface I can use with my students even with the particular situation of being outside of the country for two weeks in the very start of the classes. They catched the interface quickly and get this first hand experience with interactive programming and all of them liked it. But now we're going to move to Bots Inc and trying to "go down" to Smalltalk at least in an introductory fashion, the one allowed by Bots Inc, because I try to emphasize that informatics is not programming or computers and so we need to cover other subjects; instead programming is a way to modeling and this is a way to interpret, deconstruct and understand the world. The key is again how to go from a "production" environment to a "education" environment and from classroom to the world so, education is not that particular thing that happen "inside" schools/universities and life and culture is everything else "outside".
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What I'm saying is that it would be good to have multiple pathways into etoys, not always starting with a painting, which is a v strong default at the moment. This would probably mean the ability from the start to select a variety of morphs from a supplies or widgets tab, which is a feature of eg. my squeak 3.8 full image but not a feature of the OLPC/etoys image. You only get the paint option. I can't find the world menu to access morphs in that way at all in the etoys image so I'm wondering about the design decisions that have been made in this case and the rationale behind them.
I think what you and alan will say is that the target group for the OLPC is ages 6 to 12, one of the core_principles: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Core_principles
Fair enough but I think for this group my comments still do have some relevance, so I'll send to the list as well
And my interpretation of what you say about multiple pahtways to etoys is that we need to make Squeak a "place of continuity" (sometimes the Squeak multiverse seems so fractured) and this is not because of the sake of Squeak of programming itself, is because powerful ideas are connected ones, these that let us made translations (in the sense of Jhon Maxwell, if I'm understanding him well). (Re/)Deconstruction of really to bring new understanding or aesthetic experience (or both) would be an important objective of powerful media. One of the first translations and bridges that we need to make is from popular culture (and its use of technology) to Science/Art and even other ways of understanding. If we don't make that bridge, we have a lost battle for the souls and minds of the young people against MTV, Xbox, Nintendo, Messenger/gtalk, MySpace/Facebook etc. Deconstruction is a guide in that bridge and is not only about "having the source code", is about making the path an elucidative one, a path that changes the user, so the user can change the path.
Cheers,
Offray