On Sunday 30 Mar 2008 11:40:09 pm karl wrote:
I was playing a little with Etoys and pen use today and found that it's hard to change pen color of SketchMorphs in scripts because their color category in the Viewer is not in use. But many times I may want to change the pen color of a SketchMorph so I thought a Pen Color category could be nice.
+1 with a slight modification.
In Logo's Turtle, the pen was a tangible and visible entity which made it easy for kids to comprehend it. In Etoy, the Pen is an invisible, abstract entity whose presence is manifest only in the trails it leaves behind. This runs counter to Morphic principle of directness. Instead, pen methods could be factored into a separate Morph, say PenMorph, that can be manipulated by kids directly to affect size, color, shape, trailstyle and up/down state.
Subbu