Hi Alan,
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
A good slogan for teaching, pedagogy, and curriculum design is "When should it be easy, and when should it be hard?".
This, for me at least, is hard to figure out ahead of time when designing a lesson. I am much better when I interact with the kids and can improvise on the spot.
The notion here is that for education to be transformative, you wind up as a different "better" person than you were, and this means that certain difficulties were very important to your learning -- the stuff that was "easy" you could already do (and some of the easy stuff is not what you want to aim at). Building knowledge and skills to get fluent at handling difficulties (and in some case rendering them non-difficult) is a key for much important learning.
On the other hand, gratiutous non-productive difficulties are to be avoided because they generally both distract and occupy " thinking chunks" that one needs for the important stuff.
(I don't recognize my quote that was paraphrased)
It comes from a video I found in the Bell Labs library around 84-86 (not sure of video date). You were talking about User Interface design and my biological memory recalls you refering to using a mouse and saying "If I can do it in one click, I'll do it. If it takes two clicks, I might do it. If it takes three or more clicks, I probably won't do it". I have used and attributed it to you a number of times since. If I am in error please let me know and I will self correct.
I really could use Gorden Bell's E-Memory. Hopefully you are heeding his advice and collecting your E-memory so that we may search and study it. One way to do this is anytime you give an interview, presentation etc where it is recorded, request a copy of the recording and all rights to distribute as you see fit. Also be sure they video your presentation and not just you so we can see what you are referring to. It would be nice if we had text versions of those interviews. I am working on transcribing the interview you gave at Natural math http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/Important+questions and its time consuming. I have a friend who works on Google speech recognition software and would try and send him a copy, but Ellumintate doesn't seem to have a way to extract the audio.
Adults tend to be the biggest problems when trying to help children learn things. It's the adults who generally don't want to do the work and don't see many things as fun. Kids (and people in general) can spend a lot of time focussed and doing when they are having fun.
If not Adults, who? If the goal is transformation I see Adults as part of the solution. So does labeling them as part of the problem (which I am NOT disagreeing with) help or hinder transformation?
I ask this because I see a lot of teacher bashing which I believe hinders
our cause much more than helps it.
Another choice besides adults is older kids, I have seen this succesfully used in Scouting and in a public speaking conference my kids attended this past weekend. They tend to listen to older kids more and the older kids realize the importance of fun. The key here, as with adults, is guidance and training.
Constructivism (one of many such terms I don't use because they have lost their meanings) doesn't mean discovery from scratch (this is a huge confusion many people have), but does mean "understand and clarifying by making a careful descriptive model".
This can be done with English and writing (it is what descriptive, expositional, and argumentative writing are supposed to be about). It can be done with mathematics. It can be done in many cases with physical construction materials. And a lot can be done in terms of computer programs.
Thank you I really hadn't thought of this before and it is an excellent point (ie: something I can use with my kids).
I will look for ways my kids can learn this.
I like the Montessori curriculum approach of making a carefully designed environment for the chilldren that allows choice on their part and allows limited the degrees of freedom on the educator's part.
The problem I struggle with is how to design the environment and what games, playthinks, problems, etc to use.
One of the best projects we've ever designed is the Galilean Gravity one -- and it illustrates what you have to do with guidance on the one hand and space to play on the other to enormously raise the probability that most children will be able to see and understand what is going on without having to give them the "answer" to memorize.
I love that project and I find it extremely frustrating. Frustrating because I really want to do it with my kids, but it is really really hard to do in Etoys. The hard part being importing the video. The reason for this I believe is that the video player only supports MPEG.
The idea that kids take their own videos and then analyze them is an
excellent approach. Avigail Snir had a wonderful example of using video at Squeakfest. But as I understand it, even she had a lot of problems trying to convert the video into MPEG and even more frustrating is she is having trouble sharing it with the world so other teachers could see it and be inspired.
One of the keys in the early Montessori schools was the intense
comprehensive training of the Montessori teachers -- and the lack of the equivalent of this in most of today's schools is a huge problem.
I have also been thinking about using scripts (the theatrical kind) and cue's to look for with scripted responses as a way of teaching. Perhaps Actors would be good teachers hmmmm need to flesh out the idea more.
The scripts in Etoys are independent of the visible appearance of the object they are attached to (the objects' "costumes" can be changed at will -- and this is how "frame animation" is done in Etoys).
I'm not quite understanding what it is that you would like for teachers
beyond a repository of projects with extensive notes about how they were made and how to make them.
A repository of projects is good, but I would add a repository of objects, sets of objects and scripts. Ie: I think unit of "things you can share/store/easily re-use" is too large. I write this then ask myself, why do I feel this way? I think it goes back to the point you verbalized much better than me "It gets annoying after the first few times". I may be thinking of what you refer to later in the email as "packaging up" a solution.
I would like to be able to re-use and share those solutions (especially since Etoys lets me look inside and modify them). The ability to look inside and modify them is why I would prefer "artifacts" (as discussed in previous emails and built by Hilaire as part of iStoa) be created with scripting tiles as opposed to doing so in squeak. This would allow teacher to build a set of virtual manipulatives that others could modify or just look inside and figure out how they work. One response I received was that this would not scale, but frankly I don't understand why not.
"Packaging a solution" would also let you develop a curriculum where kids built their own tools (ex: a graphing tool) and re-use them in other projects. The one tricky part of the graphing tool is labeling the number lines (trying to align the text is hard, at least I have not found a simple solution) so perhaps a number line object would be needed.
If "learning by making" is a good idea, then shouldn't teachers learn new ideas about Etoys by making them (but with lots of guidance)?
Okay my turn to not quite understand: Yes I agree "learning by making" is agood idea. But should teachers and learners have to make everything from first principles? Who has the time?
Would teachers not benefit from using "great literture" created by people who were PUFx's (ie: had a Profound Understanding of Fundamental <subject matter>)?
I have a friend at work who while at Stanford and did very well in Organic
Chemistry, he thought the reason he did so well was he had 7 or 8 core concepts from which he could derive the rest. He decided to try and teach those concepts and when and how to use them to some of the other students to see if they could use them and "transform". It worked well and I think this idea has some merit. Unfortunately he had a head injury and can't remember them. My challenge is to find sets of core ideas and how to use them, then figure out how to present them in an age appropriate manner.
I also think you made a good point in the Natural Math interview when you mentioned Seymour Papert's comment that it doesn't much matter what mathematics we teach them as long as they are learning to reason like a mathematician.
On the other hand, there are any number of things in the Etoys design itself
that could be vastly improved to help both adult and child learning, and also for them to make better extensions.
Yes, the question I am struggling with are which are the important ones worth doing first. To think about that I am considering imposing upon myself something similar to the Warren Buffet advise to "give myself a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches - representing all the investments I could make in a lifetime". I think instead I will try and limit myself to three requests for the rest of the year. Those who know me know how hard it will be to impose that constraint. But one way would be allow myself to discuss many possible improvement (which helps me think about them) and then only pick three to request.
For example, I do all my talk presentations using Etoys and I write scripts to sequence "builds" of additive visual material to the slide (Powerpoint has a feature for doing this that is more convenient for some goals and simply won't allow others). It is very instructive to do this by hand a few times, and then gets annoying.
Agreed.
Etoys does not have a good extension mechanism for "packaging up" a solution to "slide builds" that can then be used as a feature. This is a real sin against our own precepts. The lack of it is due to EToys being thought of as temporary and of limited scope at Disney. It is terrible that we don't have it now.
I think Ricardo's GSoC Morph I/O may help solve at least part of the problem. You can save an object (including a playfield and its embedded objects) in a file and import it later. I have used it a number of times and find it very useful.
Why don't we do it now? Because we've been trying to move on to the next
design since before OLPC came along. And so forth.
I look forward to seeing the next design (I have only caught glimpses from what I have read on the VPRI site and reading into emails and discussions). Is there a time frame when we can expect to see it?
All that said, I think the most important thing to work on now is great content (projects, lesson plans, screencasts, etc.)
Many Cheers for all you have done and continue to do,
Stephen
------------------------------
*From:* Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com *To:* Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness < kharness@illinois.edu> *Cc:* etoys-dev dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland < squeakland@squeakland.org>; Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com *Sent:* Thu, August 12, 2010 8:11:46 AM *Subject:* Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
I have been reading Alan Kay's Thoughts About Teaching Science and Mathematics To Young Childrenhttp://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2007003a_thoughts.pdf :
I think one of the trickiest issues in this kind of design is an analogy to the learning of science itself, and that is *"how much should the learners/users have to do by themselves vs. how much should the curriculum/system do for them?"* Most computer users have been mostly exposed to "productivity tools" in which as many things as possible have been done for them. The kinds of educational environments we are talking about here are a*t their best when the learner does the important parts by themselves, and any black or translucent boxes serve only on the side and not at the center of the learning.* What is the center and *what is the side will shift as the learning progresses, and this has to be accommodated.
By exposing everything in Etoys as "First Principles" (which in this particular case I understand to mean, that we have a minimal set of scripting tiles and objects from which everything can be built) we avoid the "productivity tools" issue because everything is exposed. It is also a beautiful, elegant and exposes a powerful idea.
The challenge in a system where everything is done from "First Principles" is that when you are designing an"educational environment" "lesson", or "Artifact" ( better terms might be "playthink" and/or "tool to think with"), it can take a lot of work to build those preferably translucent boxes. And to paraphrase another Alan Kay quote on user interface design: "If it takes one step I'll do it, If it takes two steps I might do it, if it takes three or more steps forget about it!"
No, I am not arguing to make things easy for everyone, we need find ways to get kids to have "hard fun." Hard work and ragging a problem are good habits. I also strongly believe that giving kids a "blank canvas" and a great set of brushes and paints is an excellent and preffered method, but not the only one we should use.
I am arguing (and struggling) with is how in a "First Principle" system like Etoys, we can find ways to make it easier for teachers/designers (ie: make them more productive). I fear I see in some folks (none on this email list of course) a tendency towards what I initially saw (and fell into myself) as the constructivism trap. Where I encountered people who thought kids should construct all knowledge themselves from Scratch (pun intended ;). As I recall Alan (and others pointing out) we can't expect kids to do that, they will repeat the same mistakes people did over thousands of years. My initial thoughts are a repository of Artifacts that teachers can use along with a set of scripts (the problem with the set of scripts idea is that the scripts in Etoys are not decoupled from the ?morphs? (not sure of the correct term here, but basically the pixels visually representing the object). Bert's idea that we have a Player Variable and the scripts that operate on it is a good one, but I think there may be some bugs there, need to test more.
Now I will more directly address Kathleen's question: "What do you mean by "Artifacts". I will switch from "Artifacts" to the term "Playthinks" (which I encountered in the "The Big Book of Brain Gameshttp://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-Brain-Games-Mathematics/dp/0761134662" by Ivan Moscovich). One of the best and simplest "Playthinks" for teaching I ever encountered was Robert B. Davis' classroom warm-up (which I showed at Squeakfest and have wrote about herehttp://mrstevesscience.blogspot.com/2009/12/taking-tic-tac-toe-to-next-level-if-you.html.) Basically it involves drawing on the board a 4 x 4 grid
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Then having kids pick two numbers and using those two numbers as X and Y counting from 0 at the origin point in the lower left and then If they land on the board marking an X or O until one team wins. Some of the keys to this "Playthink" are:
- you let kids puzzle it out for themselves, they figure out the rules,
you don't tell them
- it contains a powerful idea
- it can be easily extended to other concepts (negative numbers, a
number is all the ways you can name it, is this game fair ...)
- *its fun *
Other examples of "Playthinks" would be cuisenaire rods, pentagrams, area blocks, other good "virtual manipulatives" and my feeble attempts Circle Explorer http://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10212 and Pattern Blocks and Tools http://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10216 .
*Bert*, your comments on SQ-749 sparked my writing this, I will address it more specifically in a separate email after some more thought.
Including *Alan* so he can correct any misinterpretations and hopefully comment
FYI: A lot of other excelent writings from VPRI are herehttp://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php, most are Computer Science related but a number deal with educational issues and Etoys.
Stephen
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.dewrote:
On 12.08.2010, at 10:32, Steve Thomas wrote:
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 3:32 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de
wrote:
This would likely be simple to implement, but could break existing
projects. E.g. the morphing stuff in the showcase. Maybe you could take a look?
Checked "Morphing" by Kazuhiro Abe and that should be fine. Each Polygon
in the holder has the same number of vertices and the script simple changes the positions of the vertices one at a time.
"The Walkers" and associated remixes by P.A. Dreyfus uses a special
category "morphing" which would be great to get into Etoys (although I would suggest the addition of some way to show/manage the frames) to make the invisible more visible and to make it easier to create these kind of animations. Anyway, whether this would be a problem or not depends on how it is implemented. If he stores complete information about the polygon in each frame, I see no problems. If he only stores differences and adds/removes/repositions each vertex that MAY cause a problem.
Anyway if it is a simple change and you can make it, I think I can
easily test the change by opening the project, then file-in the changes and see if anything breaks. Or you could also ask P.A. Dreyfus (master of polygon's and connectors) what he thinks as he knows and can check the changes against his implementation.
Stephen
Thinking about this more I do not like the proposal. It would makes the system less predictable.
Having the new vertex remain at the same position is the only sensible choice. It matches the "copy" behavior of regular objects, which also appear in the same position. It would not scale anyway - see this image where I only inserted 4 vertices. The position quickly converges to the next vertex position.
Also, I'd argue that "add a vertex at beginning" and "add a vertex at end" tiles are not needed in the first place. To be useful they would, as you noticed, have to be "set cursor to beginning and insert vertex" and "set cursor to end and insert vertex", because otherwise one cannot assign their position immediately. But that makes them perform two operations that are available separately. There is no good reason to coalesce those steps into one.
In any case, inserting a vertex should not change the cursor. If you want a cursor change to occur, insert a tile.
So my counter-proposal is: remove the "add vertex at beginning" and "add vertex at end" tiles. (to not break existing projects, the tiles would only be hidden)
- Bert -
etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
Le 23/08/2010 05:37, Steve Thomas a écrit :
I would like to be able to re-use and share those solutions (especially since Etoys lets me look inside and modify them). The ability to look inside and modify them is why I would prefer "artifacts" (as discussed in previous emails and built by Hilaire as part of iStoa) be created with scripting tiles as opposed to doing so in squeak. This would allow teacher to build a set of virtual manipulatives that others could modify or just look inside and figure out how they work. One response I received was that this would not scale, but frankly I don't understand why not.
I totally agree. The absence of artifact to represent math/scientific concept is frustrating for teacher. This absence makes it hard for this teacher to see how deep teaching with Etoys could be. In contrary, it seems artifacts will help Etoys to scale to a larger teacher audience.
Hilaire
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the thoughtful note!
By "when easy and when hard?" I meant parts of the pedagogical and learning processes that have been tested out ahead of time. For example, Ted Williams (one of the greatest hitters of the last 70 years) determined through experiment that using a batting tee (which he invented) would really help one very important aspect of learning to hit. On the other hand, it has also been determined by experiment that putting frets on a violin doesn't help, and is even retrograde. There are many such questions in mathematics, science, and especially computing. In writing, it is not thought to be a good thing to use a "library of already written sentences and paragraphs" to aid composing a piece. But it is done all the time in computing (and sometimes this is helpful for some of the reasons you list, and sometimes it is a very bad idea because it makes it easy to ignore building some of the important fluencies).
I still don't recognize the quote .... but if you send the Elluminate video to me, we can certainly do a transcript (there is a very speedy and reasonably inexpensive transcription company here in LA).
Criticizing teachers and adults accurately is not bashing. And the real problems have to be faced. I was very lucky to have learned to read fluently and rapidly before I entered school, and this gave me a way -- via home and town libraries -- to bypass "the barriers of adults in learning" pretty effectively except for too many unpleasant personal interactions. That being said, I also had several exemplary teachers who made a big difference in my life (and you can't substitute books for these). But the ratios of bad vs good were horrendous, and books can be read and discarded rapidly to find the good ones. The wide range of personality and motivational types we find in children suggests that "better adults" are really critical for many of them -- not all of them will be as driven as I was to get around the barriers.
The "older kids" path is a good one, and can help a lot, and much more should be done with it.
The other thing to ponder is that it is philosophically possible to make a technology that lies somewhere between what books already do -- bring us important parts of genius teachers and minds in a form that can be replicated and distributed by the millions -- and what great human teachers can do. Exactly how far this can go and what kinds of people it can work with is yet to be found out. For example, could we imagine "a book that can help kids learn how to read it"? What if we took (say) Dr Seuss books and "did something" that could help a child to read them in a variety of ways? (And by the way, here is a perfect example of "when easy, when hard?", because an overshoot of giving too much help could remove the motivation of the children to learn how to read themselves.)
To pick neutral ground, a lot of really valuable help in learning music could be given by "superbooks" -- and this is partly (a) because there is a lot known about how to teach various aspects of music (especially learning how to play an instrument), and (b) because this is one area in which "good listening" can already be done by computer programs. ("Good watching" is not so easy to do at this point.) And (c) because the computer doesn't have to do all the listening -- it can help the learner listen as well in a variety of ways. This is a key idea in several language learning environments available now.
Some subjects will be quite challenging to do "good watching" in for some time to come. But quite a bit of mathematics and especially that which overlaps with special kinds of programming have the possibility of doing good watching, so we can expect to start seeing much better environments for children over the next 10 years or so.
Re Maria Montessori -- she struggled to design her environment as well, but she stuck with it (and was a special kind of genius), so she got many good results. She is definitely a patron saint of ours ....
Re Galilean gravity ... For now, I suggest the much easier route of making "jpeg movies" (they are just a folder of images whose names sort in order). The Etoys movie player has an option for playing such jpeg files.
One of the projects for etoys that is illuminating is to make a simple movie player using animated images. (This is a perfect example of Etoys needing to have a way to package up objects (it actually does, but it is not very convenient -- the "world menu" has an option for saving morphs, and all the connections between them will be preserved if the objects are put in a Playfield first.)
That said, I completely agree that "objects should be easy to package, reuse and to share".
I think I'm not understanding your graphing example. It is "pretty easy" to position text objects containing numbers (you can adjust the centers of any object and the x and y coordinates can have some arithmetic done to them with results put in the numeric value). Please give me more info here.
I don't think "just everything" should have to be made from scratch in order to learn -- but I also think that one of the reasons that so many adults don't get fluent at this stuff is that they don't make enough things from scratch. (Analogies to drawing and painting, sports, music, etc. should be drawn here.) And, sure, they are already busy and there isn't a lot of spare time -- so the bootstrapping process is difficult when the adults start late, after they are already busy. There are chicken and egg problems also. The more fluency that is attained also changes perceptions and realities about easy and hard.
To go to science, most scientists learn most of their knowledge from reading, but it is the "real science" they do when they are starting out that changes what they are doing later from "believing in a new catechism" to "actually thinking as a scientist about scientific relationships". Similarly, there is a certain amount of "To know the world, one must construct it" (Pavese) that is absolutely critical in learning mathematics, where part of the main point is to chain together inferences and to understand how claims are preserved via that chaining.
Re: the next Etoy-like environment. The current plan is to work on a "science and systems" curriculum for ca 8th grade and to make a computer environment that can really make a difference for this curriculum. This will not be an extension of Etoys, but will be more comprehensive in many areas, and will have new abilities in others. It should wind up being better than Etoys for the 5th graders that Etoys was originally aimed at, and it should fix many of the problems that we all agree are there in the current version.
Please do follow through with your plan of asking for 3 (or 20) things -- thoughtful comments like yours are like gold for us.
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________ From: Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com To: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com; Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu Cc: etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org Sent: Sun, August 22, 2010 8:37:21 PM Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
Hi Alan,
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
A good slogan for teaching, pedagogy, and curriculum design is "When should it be easy, and when should it be hard?".
This, for me at least, is hard to figure out ahead of time when designing a lesson. I am much better when I interact with the kids and can improvise on the spot.
The notion here is that for education to be transformative, you wind up as a different "better" person than you were, and this means that certain difficulties were very important to your learning -- the stuff that was "easy" you could already do (and some of the easy stuff is not what you want to aim at). Building knowledge and skills to get fluent at handling difficulties (and in some case rendering them non-difficult) is a key for much important learning.
On the other hand, gratiutous non-productive difficulties are to be avoided because they generally both distract and occupy " thinking chunks" that one needs for the important stuff.
(I don't recognize my quote that was paraphrased) It comes from a video I found in the Bell Labs library around 84-86 (not sure of video date). You were talking about User Interface design and my biological memory recalls you refering to using a mouse and saying "If I can do it in one click, I'll do it. If it takes two clicks, I might do it. If it takes three or more clicks, I probably won't do it". I have used and attributed it to you a number of times since. If I am in error please let me know and I will self correct.
I really could use Gorden Bell's E-Memory. Hopefully you are heeding his advice and collecting your E-memory so that we may search and study it. One way to do this is anytime you give an interview, presentation etc where it is recorded, request a copy of the recording and all rights to distribute as you see fit. Also be sure they video your presentation and not just you so we can see what you are referring to. It would be nice if we had text versions of those interviews. I am working on transcribing the interview you gave at Natural math and its time consuming. I have a friend who works on Google speech recognition software and would try and send him a copy, but Ellumintate doesn't seem to have a way to extract the audio.
Adults tend to be the biggest problems when trying to help children learn things. It's the adults who generally don't want to do the work and don't see many things as fun. Kids (and people in general) can spend a lot of time focussed and doing when they are having fun.
If not Adults, who? If the goal is transformation I see Adults as part of the solution. So does labeling them as part of the problem (which I am NOT disagreeing with) help or hinder transformation?
I ask this because I see a lot of teacher bashing which I believe hinders our cause much more than helps it.
Another choice besides adults is older kids, I have seen this succesfully used in Scouting and in a public speaking conference my kids attended this past weekend. They tend to listen to older kids more and the older kids realize the importance of fun. The key here, as with adults, is guidance and training.
Constructivism (one of many such terms I don't use because they have lost their meanings) doesn't mean discovery from scratch (this is a huge confusion many people have), but does mean "understand and clarifying by making a careful descriptive model".
This can be done with English and writing (it is what descriptive, expositional, and argumentative writing are supposed to be about). It can be done with mathematics. It can be done in many cases with physical construction materials. And a lot can be done in terms of computer programs.
Thank you I really hadn't thought of this before and it is an excellent point (ie: something I can use with my kids).
I will look for ways my kids can learn this.
I like the Montessori curriculum approach of making a carefully designed environment for the chilldren that allows choice on their part and allows limited the degrees of freedom on the educator's part.
The problem I struggle with is how to design the environment and what games, playthinks, problems, etc to use.
One of the best projects we've ever designed is the Galilean Gravity one -- and it illustrates what you have to do with guidance on the one hand and space to play on the other to enormously raise the probability that most children will be able to see and understand what is going on without having to give them the "answer" to memorize.
I love that project and I find it extremely frustrating. Frustrating because I really want to do it with my kids, but it is really really hard to do in Etoys. The hard part being importing the video. The reason for this I believe is that the video player only supports MPEG.The idea that kids take their own videos and then analyze them is an excellent approach. Avigail Snir had a wonderful example of using video at Squeakfest. But as I understand it, even she had a lot of problems trying to convert the video into MPEG and even more frustrating is she is having trouble sharing it with the world so other teachers could see it and be inspired.
One of the keys in the early Montessori schools was the intense comprehensive training of the Montessori teachers -- and the lack of the equivalent of this in most of today's schools is a huge problem.
I have also been thinking about using scripts (the theatrical kind) and cue's to look for with scripted responses as a way of teaching. Perhaps Actors would be good teachers hmmmm need to flesh out the idea more.
The scripts in Etoys are independent of the visible appearance of the object they are attached to (the objects' "costumes" can be changed at will -- and this is how "frame animation" is done in Etoys).
I'm not quite understanding what it is that you would like for teachers beyond a repository of projects with extensive notes about how they were made and how to make them. A repository of projects is good, but I would add a repository of objects, sets of objects and scripts. Ie: I think unit of "things you can share/store/easily re-use" is too large. I write this then ask myself, why do I feel this way? I think it goes back to the point you verbalized much better than me "It gets annoying after the first few times". I may be thinking of what you refer to later in the email as "packaging up" a solution.
I would like to be able to re-use and share those solutions (especially since Etoys lets me look inside and modify them). The ability to look inside and modify them is why I would prefer "artifacts" (as discussed in previous emails and built by Hilaire as part of iStoa) be created with scripting tiles as opposed to doing so in squeak. This would allow teacher to build a set of virtual manipulatives that others could modify or just look inside and figure out how they work. One response I received was that this would not scale, but frankly I don't understand why not.
"Packaging a solution" would also let you develop a curriculum where kids built their own tools (ex: a graphing tool) and re-use them in other projects. The one tricky part of the graphing tool is labeling the number lines (trying to align the text is hard, at least I have not found a simple solution) so perhaps a number line object would be needed.
If "learning by making" is a good idea, then shouldn't teachers learn new ideas about Etoys by making them (but with lots of guidance)?
Okay my turn to not quite understand: Yes I agree "learning by making" is a good idea. But should teachers and learners have to make everything from first principles? Who has the time?
Would teachers not benefit from using "great literture" created by people who were PUFx's (ie: had a Profound Understanding of Fundamental <subject matter>)? I have a friend at work who while at Stanford and did very well in Organic Chemistry, he thought the reason he did so well was he had 7 or 8 core concepts from which he could derive the rest. He decided to try and teach those concepts and when and how to use them to some of the other students to see if they could use them and "transform". It worked well and I think this idea has some merit. Unfortunately he had a head injury and can't remember them. My challenge is to find sets of core ideas and how to use them, then figure out how to present them in an age appropriate manner.
I also think you made a good point in the Natural Math interview when you mentioned Seymour Papert's comment that it doesn't much matter what mathematics we teach them as long as they are learning to reason like a mathematician.
On the other hand, there are any number of things in the Etoys design itself that could be vastly improved to help both adult and child learning, and also for them to make better extensions.
Yes, the question I am struggling with are which are the important ones worth doing first. To think about that I am considering imposing upon myself something similar to the Warren Buffet advise to "give myself a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches - representing all the investments I could make in a lifetime". I think instead I will try and limit myself to three requests for the rest of the year. Those who know me know how hard it will be to impose that constraint. But one way would be allow myself to discuss many possible improvement (which helps me think about them) and then only pick three to request.
For example, I do all my talk presentations using Etoys and I write scripts to sequence "builds" of additive visual material to the slide (Powerpoint has a feature for doing this that is more convenient for some goals and simply won't allow others). It is very instructive to do this by hand a few times, and then gets annoying. Agreed.
Etoys does not have a good extension mechanism for "packaging up" a solution to "slide builds" that can then be used as a feature. This is a real sin against our own precepts. The lack of it is due to EToys being thought of as temporary and of limited scope at Disney. It is terrible that we don't have it now.
I think Ricardo's GSoC Morph I/O may help solve at least part of the problem. You can save an object (including a playfield and its embedded objects) in a file and import it later. I have used it a number of times and find it very useful.
Why don't we do it now? Because we've been trying to move on to the next design since before OLPC came along. And so forth.
I look forward to seeing the next design (I have only caught glimpses from what I have read on the VPRI site and reading into emails and discussions). Is there a time frame when we can expect to see it? All that said, I think the most important thing to work on now is great content (projects, lesson plans, screencasts, etc.)
Many Cheers for all you have done and continue to do, Stephen
________________________________ From: Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com
To: Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu Cc: etoys-dev dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org; Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com Sent: Thu, August 12, 2010 8:11:46 AM Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
I have been reading Alan Kay's Thoughts About Teaching Science and Mathematics To Young Children:
I think one of the trickiest issues in this kind of design is an analogy to the learning of science itself, and that is "how much should the learners/users have to do by themselves vs. how much should the curriculum/system do for them?" Most computer users have been mostly exposed to "productivity tools" in which as many things as possible have been done for them. The kinds of educational environments we are talking about here are at their best when the learner does the important parts by themselves, and any black or translucent boxes serve only on the side and not at the center of the learning. What is the center and what is the side will shift as the learning progresses, and this has to be accommodated.
By exposing everything in Etoys as "First Principles" (which in this particular case I understand to mean, that we have a minimal set of scripting tiles and objects from which everything can be built) we avoid the "productivity tools" issue because everything is exposed. It is also a beautiful, elegant and exposes a powerful idea.
The challenge in a system where everything is done from "First Principles" is that when you are designing an"educational environment" "lesson", or "Artifact" ( better terms might be "playthink" and/or "tool to think with"), it can take a lot of work to build those preferably translucent boxes. And to paraphrase another Alan Kay quote on user interface design: "If it takes one step I'll do it, If it takes two steps I might do it, if it takes three or more steps forget about it!"
No, I am not arguing to make things easy for everyone, we need find ways to get kids to have "hard fun." Hard work and ragging a problem are good habits. I also strongly believe that giving kids a "blank canvas" and a great set of brushes and paints is an excellent and preffered method, but not the only one we should use.
I am arguing (and struggling) with is how in a "First Principle" system like Etoys, we can find ways to make it easier for teachers/designers (ie: make them more productive). I fear I see in some folks (none on this email list of course) a tendency towards what I initially saw (and fell into myself) as the constructivism trap. Where I encountered people who thought kids should construct all knowledge themselves from Scratch (pun intended ;). As I recall Alan (and others pointing out) we can't expect kids to do that, they will repeat the same mistakes people did over thousands of years. My initial thoughts are a repository of Artifacts that teachers can use along with a set of scripts (the problem with the set of scripts idea is that the scripts in Etoys are not decoupled from the ?morphs? (not sure of the correct term here, but basically the pixels visually representing the object). Bert's idea that we have a Player Variable and the scripts that operate on it is a good one, but I think there may be some bugs there, need to test more.
Now I will more directly address Kathleen's question: "What do you mean by "Artifacts". I will switch from "Artifacts" to the term "Playthinks" (which I encountered in the "The Big Book of Brain Games" by Ivan Moscovich). One of the best and simplest "Playthinks" for teaching I ever encountered was Robert B. Davis' classroom warm-up (which I showed at Squeakfest and have wrote about here.) Basically it involves drawing on the board a 4 x 4 grid . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Then having kids pick two numbers and using those two numbers as X and Y counting from 0 at the origin point in the lower left and then If they land on the board marking an X or O until one team wins. Some of the keys to this "Playthink" are: * you let kids puzzle it out for themselves, they figure out the rules, you don't tell them * it contains a powerful idea * it can be easily extended to other concepts (negative numbers, a number is all the ways you can name it, is this game fair ...) * its fun Other examples of "Playthinks" would be cuisenaire rods, pentagrams, area blocks, other good "virtual manipulatives" and my feeble attempts Circle Explorer and Pattern Blocks and Tools.
Bert, your comments on SQ-749 sparked my writing this, I will address it more specifically in a separate email after some more thought.
Including Alan so he can correct any misinterpretations and hopefully comment
FYI: A lot of other excelent writings from VPRI are here, most are Computer Science related but a number deal with educational issues and Etoys.
Stephen On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de wrote:
On 12.08.2010, at 10:32, Steve Thomas wrote:
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 3:32 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de
wrote:
This would likely be simple to implement, but could break existing projects. E.g. the morphing stuff in the showcase. Maybe you could take a look?
Checked "Morphing" by Kazuhiro Abe and that should be fine. Each Polygon in the holder has the same number of vertices and the script simple changes the positions of the vertices one at a time.
"The Walkers" and associated remixes by P.A. Dreyfus uses a special category "morphing" which would be great to get into Etoys (although I would suggest the addition of some way to show/manage the frames) to make the invisible more visible and to make it easier to create these kind of animations. Anyway, whether this would be a problem or not depends on how it is implemented. If he stores complete information about the polygon in each frame, I see no problems. If he only stores differences and adds/removes/repositions each vertex that MAY cause a problem.
Anyway if it is a simple change and you can make it, I think I can easily test the change by opening the project, then file-in the changes and see if anything breaks. Or you could also ask P.A. Dreyfus (master of polygon's and connectors) what he thinks as he knows and can check the changes against his implementation.
Stephen
Thinking about this more I do not like the proposal. It would makes the system less predictable.
Having the new vertex remain at the same position is the only sensible choice. It matches the "copy" behavior of regular objects, which also appear in the same position. It would not scale anyway - see this image where I only inserted 4 vertices. The position quickly converges to the next vertex position.
Also, I'd argue that "add a vertex at beginning" and "add a vertex at end" tiles are not needed in the first place. To be useful they would, as you noticed, have to be "set cursor to beginning and insert vertex" and "set cursor to end and insert vertex", because otherwise one cannot assign their position immediately. But that makes them perform two operations that are available separately. There is no good reason to coalesce those steps into one.
In any case, inserting a vertex should not change the cursor. If you want a cursor change to occur, insert a tile.
So my counter-proposal is: remove the "add vertex at beginning" and "add vertex at end" tiles. (to not break existing projects, the tiles would only be hidden)
- Bert -
etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
I think I'm not understanding your graphing example. It is "pretty easy" to position text objects containing numbers (you can adjust the centers of any object and the x and y coordinates can have some arithmetic done to them with results put in the numeric value). Please give me more info here.
The problem seems to be only with centering 1 character text. To recreate, draw a vertical line, create a text object "1" and set both to the the same X value. Two or more characters align and are not an issue.
Stephen
*From:* Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com *To:* Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com; Bert Freudenberg < bert@freudenbergs.de>; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu *Cc:* etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland < squeakland@squeakland.org> *Sent:* Sun, August 22, 2010 8:37:21 PM
*Subject:* Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
Hi Alan,
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
A good slogan for teaching, pedagogy, and curriculum design is "When should it be easy, and when should it be hard?".
This, for me at least, is hard to figure out ahead of time when designing a lesson. I am much better when I interact with the kids and can improvise on the spot.
The notion here is that for education to be transformative, you wind up as a different "better" person than you were, and this means that certain difficulties were very important to your learning -- the stuff that was "easy" you could already do (and some of the easy stuff is not what you want to aim at). Building knowledge and skills to get fluent at handling difficulties (and in some case rendering them non-difficult) is a key for much important learning.
On the other hand, gratiutous non-productive difficulties are to be avoided because they generally both distract and occupy " thinking chunks" that one needs for the important stuff.
(I don't recognize my quote that was paraphrased)
It comes from a video I found in the Bell Labs library around 84-86 (not sure of video date). You were talking about User Interface design and my biological memory recalls you refering to using a mouse and saying "If I can do it in one click, I'll do it. If it takes two clicks, I might do it. If it takes three or more clicks, I probably won't do it". I have used and attributed it to you a number of times since. If I am in error please let me know and I will self correct.
I really could use Gorden Bell's E-Memory. Hopefully you are heeding his advice and collecting your E-memory so that we may search and study it. One way to do this is anytime you give an interview, presentation etc where it is recorded, request a copy of the recording and all rights to distribute as you see fit. Also be sure they video your presentation and not just you so we can see what you are referring to. It would be nice if we had text versions of those interviews. I am working on transcribing the interview you gave at Natural mathhttp://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/Important+questions and its time consuming. I have a friend who works on Google speech recognition software and would try and send him a copy, but Ellumintate doesn't seem to have a way to extract the audio.
Adults tend to be the biggest problems when trying to help children learn things. It's the adults who generally don't want to do the work and don't see many things as fun. Kids (and people in general) can spend a lot of time focussed and doing when they are having fun.
If not Adults, who? If the goal is transformation I see Adults as part of the solution. So does labeling them as part of the problem (which I am NOT disagreeing with) help or hinder transformation?
I ask this because I see a lot of teacher bashing which I believe hinders
our cause much more than helps it.
Another choice besides adults is older kids, I have seen this succesfully used in Scouting and in a public speaking conference my kids attended this past weekend. They tend to listen to older kids more and the older kids realize the importance of fun. The key here, as with adults, is guidance and training.
Constructivism (one of many such terms I don't use because they have lost their meanings) doesn't mean discovery from scratch (this is a huge confusion many people have), but does mean "understand and clarifying by making a careful descriptive model".
This can be done with English and writing (it is what descriptive, expositional, and argumentative writing are supposed to be about). It can be done with mathematics. It can be done in many cases with physical construction materials. And a lot can be done in terms of computer programs.
Thank you I really hadn't thought of this before and it is an excellent point (ie: something I can use with my kids).
I will look for ways my kids can learn this.
I like the Montessori curriculum approach of making a carefully designed environment for the chilldren that allows choice on their part and allows limited the degrees of freedom on the educator's part.
The problem I struggle with is how to design the environment and what games, playthinks, problems, etc to use.
One of the best projects we've ever designed is the Galilean Gravity one -- and it illustrates what you have to do with guidance on the one hand and space to play on the other to enormously raise the probability that most children will be able to see and understand what is going on without having to give them the "answer" to memorize.
I love that project and I find it extremely frustrating. Frustrating because I really want to do it with my kids, but it is really really hard to do in Etoys. The hard part being importing the video. The reason for this I believe is that the video player only supports MPEG.
The idea that kids take their own videos and then analyze them is an
excellent approach. Avigail Snir had a wonderful example of using video at Squeakfest. But as I understand it, even she had a lot of problems trying to convert the video into MPEG and even more frustrating is she is having trouble sharing it with the world so other teachers could see it and be inspired.
One of the keys in the early Montessori schools was the intense
comprehensive training of the Montessori teachers -- and the lack of the equivalent of this in most of today's schools is a huge problem.
I have also been thinking about using scripts (the theatrical kind) and cue's to look for with scripted responses as a way of teaching. Perhaps Actors would be good teachers hmmmm need to flesh out the idea more.
The scripts in Etoys are independent of the visible appearance of the object they are attached to (the objects' "costumes" can be changed at will -- and this is how "frame animation" is done in Etoys).
I'm not quite understanding what it is that you would like for teachers
beyond a repository of projects with extensive notes about how they were made and how to make them.
A repository of projects is good, but I would add a repository of objects, sets of objects and scripts. Ie: I think unit of "things you can share/store/easily re-use" is too large. I write this then ask myself, why do I feel this way? I think it goes back to the point you verbalized much better than me "It gets annoying after the first few times". I may be thinking of what you refer to later in the email as "packaging up" a solution.
I would like to be able to re-use and share those solutions (especially since Etoys lets me look inside and modify them). The ability to look inside and modify them is why I would prefer "artifacts" (as discussed in previous emails and built by Hilaire as part of iStoa) be created with scripting tiles as opposed to doing so in squeak. This would allow teacher to build a set of virtual manipulatives that others could modify or just look inside and figure out how they work. One response I received was that this would not scale, but frankly I don't understand why not.
"Packaging a solution" would also let you develop a curriculum where kids built their own tools (ex: a graphing tool) and re-use them in other projects. The one tricky part of the graphing tool is labeling the number lines (trying to align the text is hard, at least I have not found a simple solution) so perhaps a number line object would be needed.
If "learning by making" is a good idea, then shouldn't teachers learn new ideas about Etoys by making them (but with lots of guidance)?
Okay my turn to not quite understand: Yes I agree "learning by making" is a good idea. But should teachers and learners have to make everything from first principles? Who has the time?
Would teachers not benefit from using "great literture" created by people who were PUFx's (ie: had a Profound Understanding of Fundamental <subject matter>)?
I have a friend at work who while at Stanford and did very well in Organic
Chemistry, he thought the reason he did so well was he had 7 or 8 core concepts from which he could derive the rest. He decided to try and teach those concepts and when and how to use them to some of the other students to see if they could use them and "transform". It worked well and I think this idea has some merit. Unfortunately he had a head injury and can't remember them. My challenge is to find sets of core ideas and how to use them, then figure out how to present them in an age appropriate manner.
I also think you made a good point in the Natural Math interview when you mentioned Seymour Papert's comment that it doesn't much matter what mathematics we teach them as long as they are learning to reason like a mathematician.
On the other hand, there are any number of things in the Etoys design
itself that could be vastly improved to help both adult and child learning, and also for them to make better extensions.
Yes, the question I am struggling with are which are the important ones worth doing first. To think about that I am considering imposing upon myself something similar to the Warren Buffet advise to "give myself a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches - representing all the investments I could make in a lifetime". I think instead I will try and limit myself to three requests for the rest of the year. Those who know me know how hard it will be to impose that constraint. But one way would be allow myself to discuss many possible improvement (which helps me think about them) and then only pick three to request.
For example, I do all my talk presentations using Etoys and I write scripts to sequence "builds" of additive visual material to the slide (Powerpoint has a feature for doing this that is more convenient for some goals and simply won't allow others). It is very instructive to do this by hand a few times, and then gets annoying.
Agreed.
Etoys does not have a good extension mechanism for "packaging up" a solution to "slide builds" that can then be used as a feature. This is a real sin against our own precepts. The lack of it is due to EToys being thought of as temporary and of limited scope at Disney. It is terrible that we don't have it now.
I think Ricardo's GSoC Morph I/O may help solve at least part of the problem. You can save an object (including a playfield and its embedded objects) in a file and import it later. I have used it a number of times and find it very useful.
Why don't we do it now? Because we've been trying to move on to the next
design since before OLPC came along. And so forth.
I look forward to seeing the next design (I have only caught glimpses from what I have read on the VPRI site and reading into emails and discussions). Is there a time frame when we can expect to see it?
All that said, I think the most important thing to work on now is great content (projects, lesson plans, screencasts, etc.)
Many Cheers for all you have done and continue to do,
Stephen
*From:* Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com *To:* Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness < kharness@illinois.edu> *Cc:* etoys-dev dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland < squeakland@squeakland.org>; Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com *Sent:* Thu, August 12, 2010 8:11:46 AM *Subject:* Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
I have been reading Alan Kay's Thoughts About Teaching Science and Mathematics To Young Childrenhttp://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2007003a_thoughts.pdf :
I think one of the trickiest issues in this kind of design is an analogy to the learning of science itself, and that is *"how much should the learners/users have to do by themselves vs. how much should the curriculum/system do for them?"* Most computer users have been mostly exposed to "productivity tools" in which as many things as possible have been done for them. The kinds of educational environments we are talking about here are a*t their best when the learner does the important parts by themselves, and any black or translucent boxes serve only on the side and not at the center of the learning.* What is the center and *what is the side will shift as the learning progresses, and this has to be accommodated.
By exposing everything in Etoys as "First Principles" (which in this particular case I understand to mean, that we have a minimal set of scripting tiles and objects from which everything can be built) we avoid the "productivity tools" issue because everything is exposed. It is also a beautiful, elegant and exposes a powerful idea.
The challenge in a system where everything is done from "First Principles" is that when you are designing an"educational environment" "lesson", or "Artifact" ( better terms might be "playthink" and/or "tool to think with"), it can take a lot of work to build those preferably translucent boxes. And to paraphrase another Alan Kay quote on user interface design: "If it takes one step I'll do it, If it takes two steps I might do it, if it takes three or more steps forget about it!"
No, I am not arguing to make things easy for everyone, we need find ways to get kids to have "hard fun." Hard work and ragging a problem are good habits. I also strongly believe that giving kids a "blank canvas" and a great set of brushes and paints is an excellent and preffered method, but not the only one we should use.
I am arguing (and struggling) with is how in a "First Principle" system like Etoys, we can find ways to make it easier for teachers/designers (ie: make them more productive). I fear I see in some folks (none on this email list of course) a tendency towards what I initially saw (and fell into myself) as the constructivism trap. Where I encountered people who thought kids should construct all knowledge themselves from Scratch (pun intended ;). As I recall Alan (and others pointing out) we can't expect kids to do that, they will repeat the same mistakes people did over thousands of years. My initial thoughts are a repository of Artifacts that teachers can use along with a set of scripts (the problem with the set of scripts idea is that the scripts in Etoys are not decoupled from the ?morphs? (not sure of the correct term here, but basically the pixels visually representing the object). Bert's idea that we have a Player Variable and the scripts that operate on it is a good one, but I think there may be some bugs there, need to test more.
Now I will more directly address Kathleen's question: "What do you mean by "Artifacts". I will switch from "Artifacts" to the term "Playthinks" (which I encountered in the "The Big Book of Brain Gameshttp://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-Brain-Games-Mathematics/dp/0761134662" by Ivan Moscovich). One of the best and simplest "Playthinks" for teaching I ever encountered was Robert B. Davis' classroom warm-up (which I showed at Squeakfest and have wrote about herehttp://mrstevesscience.blogspot.com/2009/12/taking-tic-tac-toe-to-next-level-if-you.html.) Basically it involves drawing on the board a 4 x 4 grid
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Then having kids pick two numbers and using those two numbers as X and Y counting from 0 at the origin point in the lower left and then If they land on the board marking an X or O until one team wins. Some of the keys to this "Playthink" are:
- you let kids puzzle it out for themselves, they figure out the
rules, you don't tell them
- it contains a powerful idea
- it can be easily extended to other concepts (negative numbers, a
number is all the ways you can name it, is this game fair ...)
- *its fun *
Other examples of "Playthinks" would be cuisenaire rods, pentagrams, area blocks, other good "virtual manipulatives" and my feeble attempts Circle Explorer http://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10212 and Pattern Blocks and Toolshttp://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10216 .
*Bert*, your comments on SQ-749 sparked my writing this, I will address it more specifically in a separate email after some more thought.
Including *Alan* so he can correct any misinterpretations and hopefully comment
FYI: A lot of other excelent writings from VPRI are herehttp://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php, most are Computer Science related but a number deal with educational issues and Etoys.
Stephen
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.dewrote:
On 12.08.2010, at 10:32, Steve Thomas wrote:
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 3:32 AM, Bert Freudenberg <
bert@freudenbergs.de> wrote:
This would likely be simple to implement, but could break existing
projects. E.g. the morphing stuff in the showcase. Maybe you could take a look?
Checked "Morphing" by Kazuhiro Abe and that should be fine. Each
Polygon in the holder has the same number of vertices and the script simple changes the positions of the vertices one at a time.
"The Walkers" and associated remixes by P.A. Dreyfus uses a special
category "morphing" which would be great to get into Etoys (although I would suggest the addition of some way to show/manage the frames) to make the invisible more visible and to make it easier to create these kind of animations. Anyway, whether this would be a problem or not depends on how it is implemented. If he stores complete information about the polygon in each frame, I see no problems. If he only stores differences and adds/removes/repositions each vertex that MAY cause a problem.
Anyway if it is a simple change and you can make it, I think I can
easily test the change by opening the project, then file-in the changes and see if anything breaks. Or you could also ask P.A. Dreyfus (master of polygon's and connectors) what he thinks as he knows and can check the changes against his implementation.
Stephen
Thinking about this more I do not like the proposal. It would makes the system less predictable.
Having the new vertex remain at the same position is the only sensible choice. It matches the "copy" behavior of regular objects, which also appear in the same position. It would not scale anyway - see this image where I only inserted 4 vertices. The position quickly converges to the next vertex position.
Also, I'd argue that "add a vertex at beginning" and "add a vertex at end" tiles are not needed in the first place. To be useful they would, as you noticed, have to be "set cursor to beginning and insert vertex" and "set cursor to end and insert vertex", because otherwise one cannot assign their position immediately. But that makes them perform two operations that are available separately. There is no good reason to coalesce those steps into one.
In any case, inserting a vertex should not change the cursor. If you want a cursor change to occur, insert a tile.
So my counter-proposal is: remove the "add vertex at beginning" and "add vertex at end" tiles. (to not break existing projects, the tiles would only be hidden)
- Bert -
etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
On 23.08.2010, at 14:48, Steve Thomas wrote:
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
I think I'm not understanding your graphing example. It is "pretty easy" to position text objects containing numbers (you can adjust the centers of any object and the x and y coordinates can have some arithmetic done to them with results put in the numeric value). Please give me more info here.
The problem seems to be only with centering 1 character text. To recreate, draw a vertical line, create a text object "1" and set both to the the same X value. Two or more characters align and are not an issue.
If you make the Text a bit wider, it works (provided you enabled centering in the text).
- Bert -
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 9:08 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.dewrote:
On 23.08.2010, at 14:48, Steve Thomas wrote:
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
I think I'm not understanding your graphing example. It is "pretty easy"
to position text objects containing numbers (you can adjust the centers of any object and the x and y coordinates can have some arithmetic done to them with results put in the numeric value). Please give me more info here.
The problem seems to be only with centering 1 character text. To
recreate, draw a vertical line, create a text object "1" and set both to the the same X value. Two or more characters align and are not an issue.
If you make the Text a bit wider, it works (provided you enabled centering in the text).
Way cool way to test centering!
So I am considering cloning Bert as one of my top 20 ;)
Thanks!!! Stephen
Hi Stephen
It seems to work (see attached picture).
Remember that "text is text", if you want to use it as a label then you can center it by using the FF menu.
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________ From: Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com To: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com Cc: Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu; etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org Sent: Mon, August 23, 2010 5:48:07 AM Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
I think I'm not understanding your graphing example. It is "pretty easy" to position text objects containing numbers (you can adjust the centers of any object and the x and y coordinates can have some arithmetic done to them with results put in the numeric value). Please give me more info here.
The problem seems to be only with centering 1 character text. To recreate, draw a vertical line, create a text object "1" and set both to the the same X value. Two or more characters align and are not an issue.
Stephen
________________________________ From: Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com
To: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com; Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu Cc: etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org Sent: Sun, August 22, 2010 8:37:21 PM
Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
Hi Alan,
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
A good slogan for teaching, pedagogy, and curriculum design is "When should it be easy, and when should it be hard?".
This, for me at least, is hard to figure out ahead of time when designing a lesson. I am much better when I interact with the kids and can improvise on the spot.
The notion here is that for education to be transformative, you wind up as a different "better" person than you were, and this means that certain difficulties were very important to your learning -- the stuff that was "easy" you could already do (and some of the easy stuff is not what you want to aim at). Building knowledge and skills to get fluent at handling difficulties (and in some case rendering them non-difficult) is a key for much important learning.
On the other hand, gratiutous non-productive difficulties are to be avoided because they generally both distract and occupy " thinking chunks" that one needs for the important stuff.
(I don't recognize my quote that was paraphrased) It comes from a video I found in the Bell Labs library around 84-86 (not sure of video date). You were talking about User Interface design and my biological memory recalls you refering to using a mouse and saying "If I can do it in one click, I'll do it. If it takes two clicks, I might do it. If it takes three or more clicks, I probably won't do it". I have used and attributed it to you a number of times since. If I am in error please let me know and I will self correct.
I really could use Gorden Bell's E-Memory. Hopefully you are heeding his advice and collecting your E-memory so that we may search and study it. One way to do this is anytime you give an interview, presentation etc where it is recorded, request a copy of the recording and all rights to distribute as you see fit. Also be sure they video your presentation and not just you so we can see what you are referring to. It would be nice if we had text versions of those interviews. I am working on transcribing the interview you gave at Natural math and its time consuming. I have a friend who works on Google speech recognition software and would try and send him a copy, but Ellumintate doesn't seem to have a way to extract the audio.
Adults tend to be the biggest problems when trying to help children learn things. It's the adults who generally don't want to do the work and don't see many things as fun. Kids (and people in general) can spend a lot of time focussed and doing when they are having fun.
If not Adults, who? If the goal is transformation I see Adults as part of the solution. So does labeling them as part of the problem (which I am NOT disagreeing with) help or hinder transformation?
I ask this because I see a lot of teacher bashing which I believe hinders our cause much more than helps it.
Another choice besides adults is older kids, I have seen this succesfully used in Scouting and in a public speaking conference my kids attended this past weekend. They tend to listen to older kids more and the older kids realize the importance of fun. The key here, as with adults, is guidance and training.
Constructivism (one of many such terms I don't use because they have lost their meanings) doesn't mean discovery from scratch (this is a huge confusion many people have), but does mean "understand and clarifying by making a careful descriptive model".
This can be done with English and writing (it is what descriptive, expositional, and argumentative writing are supposed to be about). It can be done with mathematics. It can be done in many cases with physical construction materials. And a lot can be done in terms of computer programs.
Thank you I really hadn't thought of this before and it is an excellent point (ie: something I can use with my kids).
I will look for ways my kids can learn this.
I like the Montessori curriculum approach of making a carefully designed environment for the chilldren that allows choice on their part and allows limited the degrees of freedom on the educator's part.
The problem I struggle with is how to design the environment and what games, playthinks, problems, etc to use.
One of the best projects we've ever designed is the Galilean Gravity one -- and it illustrates what you have to do with guidance on the one hand and space to play on the other to enormously raise the probability that most children will be able to see and understand what is going on without having to give them the "answer" to memorize.
I love that project and I find it extremely frustrating. Frustrating because I really want to do it with my kids, but it is really really hard to do in Etoys. The hard part being importing the video. The reason for this I believe is that the video player only supports MPEG.The idea that kids take their own videos and then analyze them is an excellent approach. Avigail Snir had a wonderful example of using video at Squeakfest. But as I understand it, even she had a lot of problems trying to convert the video into MPEG and even more frustrating is she is having trouble sharing it with the world so other teachers could see it and be inspired.
One of the keys in the early Montessori schools was the intense comprehensive training of the Montessori teachers -- and the lack of the equivalent of this in most of today's schools is a huge problem.
I have also been thinking about using scripts (the theatrical kind) and cue's to look for with scripted responses as a way of teaching. Perhaps Actors would be good teachers hmmmm need to flesh out the idea more.
The scripts in Etoys are independent of the visible appearance of the object they are attached to (the objects' "costumes" can be changed at will -- and this is how "frame animation" is done in Etoys).
I'm not quite understanding what it is that you would like for teachers beyond a repository of projects with extensive notes about how they were made and how to make them. A repository of projects is good, but I would add a repository of objects, sets of objects and scripts. Ie: I think unit of "things you can share/store/easily re-use" is too large. I write this then ask myself, why do I feel this way? I think it goes back to the point you verbalized much better than me "It gets annoying after the first few times". I may be thinking of what you refer to later in the email as "packaging up" a solution.
I would like to be able to re-use and share those solutions (especially since Etoys lets me look inside and modify them). The ability to look inside and modify them is why I would prefer "artifacts" (as discussed in previous emails and built by Hilaire as part of iStoa) be created with scripting tiles as opposed to doing so in squeak. This would allow teacher to build a set of virtual manipulatives that others could modify or just look inside and figure out how they work. One response I received was that this would not scale, but frankly I don't understand why not.
"Packaging a solution" would also let you develop a curriculum where kids built their own tools (ex: a graphing tool) and re-use them in other projects. The one tricky part of the graphing tool is labeling the number lines (trying to align the text is hard, at least I have not found a simple solution) so perhaps a number line object would be needed.
If "learning by making" is a good idea, then shouldn't teachers learn new ideas about Etoys by making them (but with lots of guidance)?
Okay my turn to not quite understand: Yes I agree "learning by making" is a good idea. But should teachers and learners have to make everything from first principles? Who has the time?
Would teachers not benefit from using "great literture" created by people who were PUFx's (ie: had a Profound Understanding of Fundamental <subject matter>)? I have a friend at work who while at Stanford and did very well in Organic Chemistry, he thought the reason he did so well was he had 7 or 8 core concepts from which he could derive the rest. He decided to try and teach those concepts and when and how to use them to some of the other students to see if they could use them and "transform". It worked well and I think this idea has some merit. Unfortunately he had a head injury and can't remember them. My challenge is to find sets of core ideas and how to use them, then figure out how to present them in an age appropriate manner.
I also think you made a good point in the Natural Math interview when you mentioned Seymour Papert's comment that it doesn't much matter what mathematics we teach them as long as they are learning to reason like a mathematician.
On the other hand, there are any number of things in the Etoys design itself that could be vastly improved to help both adult and child learning, and also for them to make better extensions.
Yes, the question I am struggling with are which are the important ones worth doing first. To think about that I am considering imposing upon myself something similar to the Warren Buffet advise to "give myself a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches - representing all the investments I could make in a lifetime". I think instead I will try and limit myself to three requests for the rest of the year. Those who know me know how hard it will be to impose that constraint. But one way would be allow myself to discuss many possible improvement (which helps me think about them) and then only pick three to request.
For example, I do all my talk presentations using Etoys and I write scripts to sequence "builds" of additive visual material to the slide (Powerpoint has a feature for doing this that is more convenient for some goals and simply won't allow others). It is very instructive to do this by hand a few times, and then gets annoying. Agreed.
Etoys does not have a good extension mechanism for "packaging up" a solution to "slide builds" that can then be used as a feature. This is a real sin against our own precepts. The lack of it is due to EToys being thought of as temporary and of limited scope at Disney. It is terrible that we don't have it now.
I think Ricardo's GSoC Morph I/O may help solve at least part of the problem. You can save an object (including a playfield and its embedded objects) in a file and import it later. I have used it a number of times and find it very useful.
Why don't we do it now? Because we've been trying to move on to the next design since before OLPC came along. And so forth.
I look forward to seeing the next design (I have only caught glimpses from what I have read on the VPRI site and reading into emails and discussions). Is there a time frame when we can expect to see it? All that said, I think the most important thing to work on now is great content (projects, lesson plans, screencasts, etc.)
Many Cheers for all you have done and continue to do, Stephen
________________________________ From: Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com
To: Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu Cc: etoys-dev dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org; Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com Sent: Thu, August 12, 2010 8:11:46 AM Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
I have been reading Alan Kay's Thoughts About Teaching Science and Mathematics To Young Children:
I think one of the trickiest issues in this kind of design is an analogy to the learning of science itself, and that is "how much should the learners/users have to do by themselves vs. how much should the curriculum/system do for them?" Most computer users have been mostly exposed to "productivity tools" in which as many things as possible have been done for them. The kinds of educational environments we are talking about here are at their best when the learner does the important parts by themselves, and any black or translucent boxes serve only on the side and not at the center of the learning. What is the center and what is the side will shift as the learning progresses, and this has to be accommodated.
By exposing everything in Etoys as "First Principles" (which in this particular case I understand to mean, that we have a minimal set of scripting tiles and objects from which everything can be built) we avoid the "productivity tools" issue because everything is exposed. It is also a beautiful, elegant and exposes a powerful idea.
The challenge in a system where everything is done from "First Principles" is that when you are designing an"educational environment" "lesson", or "Artifact" ( better terms might be "playthink" and/or "tool to think with"), it can take a lot of work to build those preferably translucent boxes. And to paraphrase another Alan Kay quote on user interface design: "If it takes one step I'll do it, If it takes two steps I might do it, if it takes three or more steps forget about it!"
No, I am not arguing to make things easy for everyone, we need find ways to get kids to have "hard fun." Hard work and ragging a problem are good habits. I also strongly believe that giving kids a "blank canvas" and a great set of brushes and paints is an excellent and preffered method, but not the only one we should use.
I am arguing (and struggling) with is how in a "First Principle" system like Etoys, we can find ways to make it easier for teachers/designers (ie: make them more productive). I fear I see in some folks (none on this email list of course) a tendency towards what I initially saw (and fell into myself) as the constructivism trap. Where I encountered people who thought kids should construct all knowledge themselves from Scratch (pun intended ;). As I recall Alan (and others pointing out) we can't expect kids to do that, they will repeat the same mistakes people did over thousands of years. My initial thoughts are a repository of Artifacts that teachers can use along with a set of scripts (the problem with the set of scripts idea is that the scripts in Etoys are not decoupled from the ?morphs? (not sure of the correct term here, but basically the pixels visually representing the object). Bert's idea that we have a Player Variable and the scripts that operate on it is a good one, but I think there may be some bugs there, need to test more.
Now I will more directly address Kathleen's question: "What do you mean by "Artifacts". I will switch from "Artifacts" to the term "Playthinks" (which I encountered in the "The Big Book of Brain Games" by Ivan Moscovich). One of the best and simplest "Playthinks" for teaching I ever encountered was Robert B. Davis' classroom warm-up (which I showed at Squeakfest and have wrote about here.) Basically it involves drawing on the board a 4 x 4 grid . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Then having kids pick two numbers and using those two numbers as X and Y counting from 0 at the origin point in the lower left and then If they land on the board marking an X or O until one team wins. Some of the keys to this "Playthink" are: * you let kids puzzle it out for themselves, they figure out the rules, you don't tell them * it contains a powerful idea * it can be easily extended to other concepts (negative numbers, a number is all the ways you can name it, is this game fair ...) * its fun Other examples of "Playthinks" would be cuisenaire rods, pentagrams, area blocks, other good "virtual manipulatives" and my feeble attempts Circle Explorer and Pattern Blocks and Tools.
Bert, your comments on SQ-749 sparked my writing this, I will address it more specifically in a separate email after some more thought.
Including Alan so he can correct any misinterpretations and hopefully comment
FYI: A lot of other excelent writings from VPRI are here, most are Computer Science related but a number deal with educational issues and Etoys.
Stephen On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de wrote:
On 12.08.2010, at 10:32, Steve Thomas wrote:
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 3:32 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de
wrote:
This would likely be simple to implement, but could break existing projects. E.g. the morphing stuff in the showcase. Maybe you could take a look?
Checked "Morphing" by Kazuhiro Abe and that should be fine. Each Polygon in the holder has the same number of vertices and the script simple changes the positions of the vertices one at a time.
"The Walkers" and associated remixes by P.A. Dreyfus uses a special category "morphing" which would be great to get into Etoys (although I would suggest the addition of some way to show/manage the frames) to make the invisible more visible and to make it easier to create these kind of animations. Anyway, whether this would be a problem or not depends on how it is implemented. If he stores complete information about the polygon in each frame, I see no problems. If he only stores differences and adds/removes/repositions each vertex that MAY cause a problem.
Anyway if it is a simple change and you can make it, I think I can easily test the change by opening the project, then file-in the changes and see if anything breaks. Or you could also ask P.A. Dreyfus (master of polygon's and connectors) what he thinks as he knows and can check the changes against his implementation.
Stephen
Thinking about this more I do not like the proposal. It would makes the system less predictable.
Having the new vertex remain at the same position is the only sensible choice. It matches the "copy" behavior of regular objects, which also appear in the same position. It would not scale anyway - see this image where I only inserted 4 vertices. The position quickly converges to the next vertex position.
Also, I'd argue that "add a vertex at beginning" and "add a vertex at end" tiles are not needed in the first place. To be useful they would, as you noticed, have to be "set cursor to beginning and insert vertex" and "set cursor to end and insert vertex", because otherwise one cannot assign their position immediately. But that makes them perform two operations that are available separately. There is no good reason to coalesce those steps into one.
In any case, inserting a vertex should not change the cursor. If you want a cursor change to occur, insert a tile.
So my counter-proposal is: remove the "add vertex at beginning" and "add vertex at end" tiles. (to not break existing projects, the tiles would only be hidden)
- Bert -
etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
Minor point of clarification, it works when you change the width of the text Object and center the text, which is the solution Bert came up with and I will use for now.
It doesn't work if you unless you change the width attribute of the text object and center the text. See attached screenshot.
See attached screenshot[image: Screen shot 2010-08-23 at 1.51.53 PM.png]
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 11:23 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
Hi Stephen
It seems to work (see attached picture).
Remember that "text is text", if you want to use it as a label then you can center it by using the FF menu.
Cheers,
Alan
*From:* Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com *To:* Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com *Cc:* Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness < kharness@illinois.edu>; etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland < squeakland@squeakland.org> *Sent:* Mon, August 23, 2010 5:48:07 AM
*Subject:* Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
I think I'm not understanding your graphing example. It is "pretty easy" to position text objects containing numbers (you can adjust the centers of any object and the x and y coordinates can have some arithmetic done to them with results put in the numeric value). Please give me more info here.
The problem seems to be only with centering 1 character text. To recreate, draw a vertical line, create a text object "1" and set both to the the same X value. Two or more characters align and are not an issue.
Stephen
*From:* Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com *To:* Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com; Bert Freudenberg < bert@freudenbergs.de>; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu *Cc:* etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland < squeakland@squeakland.org> *Sent:* Sun, August 22, 2010 8:37:21 PM
*Subject:* Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
Hi Alan,
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
A good slogan for teaching, pedagogy, and curriculum design is "When should it be easy, and when should it be hard?".
This, for me at least, is hard to figure out ahead of time when designing a lesson. I am much better when I interact with the kids and can improvise on the spot.
The notion here is that for education to be transformative, you wind up as a different "better" person than you were, and this means that certain difficulties were very important to your learning -- the stuff that was "easy" you could already do (and some of the easy stuff is not what you want to aim at). Building knowledge and skills to get fluent at handling difficulties (and in some case rendering them non-difficult) is a key for much important learning.
On the other hand, gratiutous non-productive difficulties are to be avoided because they generally both distract and occupy " thinking chunks" that one needs for the important stuff.
(I don't recognize my quote that was paraphrased)
It comes from a video I found in the Bell Labs library around 84-86 (not sure of video date). You were talking about User Interface design and my biological memory recalls you refering to using a mouse and saying "If I can do it in one click, I'll do it. If it takes two clicks, I might do it. If it takes three or more clicks, I probably won't do it". I have used and attributed it to you a number of times since. If I am in error please let me know and I will self correct.
I really could use Gorden Bell's E-Memory. Hopefully you are heeding his advice and collecting your E-memory so that we may search and study it. One way to do this is anytime you give an interview, presentation etc where it is recorded, request a copy of the recording and all rights to distribute as you see fit. Also be sure they video your presentation and not just you so we can see what you are referring to. It would be nice if we had text versions of those interviews. I am working on transcribing the interview you gave at Natural mathhttp://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/Important+questions and its time consuming. I have a friend who works on Google speech recognition software and would try and send him a copy, but Ellumintate doesn't seem to have a way to extract the audio.
Adults tend to be the biggest problems when trying to help children learn things. It's the adults who generally don't want to do the work and don't see many things as fun. Kids (and people in general) can spend a lot of time focussed and doing when they are having fun.
If not Adults, who? If the goal is transformation I see Adults as part of the solution. So does labeling them as part of the problem (which I am NOT disagreeing with) help or hinder transformation?
I ask this because I see a lot of teacher bashing which I believe hinders
our cause much more than helps it.
Another choice besides adults is older kids, I have seen this succesfully used in Scouting and in a public speaking conference my kids attended this past weekend. They tend to listen to older kids more and the older kids realize the importance of fun. The key here, as with adults, is guidance and training.
Constructivism (one of many such terms I don't use because they have lost their meanings) doesn't mean discovery from scratch (this is a huge confusion many people have), but does mean "understand and clarifying by making a careful descriptive model".
This can be done with English and writing (it is what descriptive, expositional, and argumentative writing are supposed to be about). It can be done with mathematics. It can be done in many cases with physical construction materials. And a lot can be done in terms of computer programs.
Thank you I really hadn't thought of this before and it is an excellent point (ie: something I can use with my kids).
I will look for ways my kids can learn this.
I like the Montessori curriculum approach of making a carefully designed environment for the chilldren that allows choice on their part and allows limited the degrees of freedom on the educator's part.
The problem I struggle with is how to design the environment and what games, playthinks, problems, etc to use.
One of the best projects we've ever designed is the Galilean Gravity one -- and it illustrates what you have to do with guidance on the one hand and space to play on the other to enormously raise the probability that most children will be able to see and understand what is going on without having to give them the "answer" to memorize.
I love that project and I find it extremely frustrating. Frustrating because I really want to do it with my kids, but it is really really hard to do in Etoys. The hard part being importing the video. The reason for this I believe is that the video player only supports MPEG.
The idea that kids take their own videos and then analyze them is an
excellent approach. Avigail Snir had a wonderful example of using video at Squeakfest. But as I understand it, even she had a lot of problems trying to convert the video into MPEG and even more frustrating is she is having trouble sharing it with the world so other teachers could see it and be inspired.
One of the keys in the early Montessori schools was the intense
comprehensive training of the Montessori teachers -- and the lack of the equivalent of this in most of today's schools is a huge problem.
I have also been thinking about using scripts (the theatrical kind) and cue's to look for with scripted responses as a way of teaching. Perhaps Actors would be good teachers hmmmm need to flesh out the idea more.
The scripts in Etoys are independent of the visible appearance of the object they are attached to (the objects' "costumes" can be changed at will -- and this is how "frame animation" is done in Etoys).
I'm not quite understanding what it is that you would like for teachers
beyond a repository of projects with extensive notes about how they were made and how to make them.
A repository of projects is good, but I would add a repository of objects, sets of objects and scripts. Ie: I think unit of "things you can share/store/easily re-use" is too large. I write this then ask myself, why do I feel this way? I think it goes back to the point you verbalized much better than me "It gets annoying after the first few times". I may be thinking of what you refer to later in the email as "packaging up" a solution.
I would like to be able to re-use and share those solutions (especially since Etoys lets me look inside and modify them). The ability to look inside and modify them is why I would prefer "artifacts" (as discussed in previous emails and built by Hilaire as part of iStoa) be created with scripting tiles as opposed to doing so in squeak. This would allow teacher to build a set of virtual manipulatives that others could modify or just look inside and figure out how they work. One response I received was that this would not scale, but frankly I don't understand why not.
"Packaging a solution" would also let you develop a curriculum where kids built their own tools (ex: a graphing tool) and re-use them in other projects. The one tricky part of the graphing tool is labeling the number lines (trying to align the text is hard, at least I have not found a simple solution) so perhaps a number line object would be needed.
If "learning by making" is a good idea, then shouldn't teachers learn new ideas about Etoys by making them (but with lots of guidance)?
Okay my turn to not quite understand: Yes I agree "learning by making" is a good idea. But should teachers and learners have to make everything from first principles? Who has the time?
Would teachers not benefit from using "great literture" created by people who were PUFx's (ie: had a Profound Understanding of Fundamental <subject matter>)?
I have a friend at work who while at Stanford and did very well in
Organic Chemistry, he thought the reason he did so well was he had 7 or 8 core concepts from which he could derive the rest. He decided to try and teach those concepts and when and how to use them to some of the other students to see if they could use them and "transform". It worked well and I think this idea has some merit. Unfortunately he had a head injury and can't remember them. My challenge is to find sets of core ideas and how to use them, then figure out how to present them in an age appropriate manner.
I also think you made a good point in the Natural Math interview when you mentioned Seymour Papert's comment that it doesn't much matter what mathematics we teach them as long as they are learning to reason like a mathematician.
On the other hand, there are any number of things in the Etoys design
itself that could be vastly improved to help both adult and child learning, and also for them to make better extensions.
Yes, the question I am struggling with are which are the important ones worth doing first. To think about that I am considering imposing upon myself something similar to the Warren Buffet advise to "give myself a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches - representing all the investments I could make in a lifetime". I think instead I will try and limit myself to three requests for the rest of the year. Those who know me know how hard it will be to impose that constraint. But one way would be allow myself to discuss many possible improvement (which helps me think about them) and then only pick three to request.
For example, I do all my talk presentations using Etoys and I write scripts to sequence "builds" of additive visual material to the slide (Powerpoint has a feature for doing this that is more convenient for some goals and simply won't allow others). It is very instructive to do this by hand a few times, and then gets annoying.
Agreed.
Etoys does not have a good extension mechanism for "packaging up" a solution to "slide builds" that can then be used as a feature. This is a real sin against our own precepts. The lack of it is due to EToys being thought of as temporary and of limited scope at Disney. It is terrible that we don't have it now.
I think Ricardo's GSoC Morph I/O may help solve at least part of the problem. You can save an object (including a playfield and its embedded objects) in a file and import it later. I have used it a number of times and find it very useful.
Why don't we do it now? Because we've been trying to move on to the next
design since before OLPC came along. And so forth.
I look forward to seeing the next design (I have only caught glimpses from what I have read on the VPRI site and reading into emails and discussions). Is there a time frame when we can expect to see it?
All that said, I think the most important thing to work on now is great content (projects, lesson plans, screencasts, etc.)
Many Cheers for all you have done and continue to do,
Stephen
*From:* Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com *To:* Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness < kharness@illinois.edu> *Cc:* etoys-dev dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland < squeakland@squeakland.org>; Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com *Sent:* Thu, August 12, 2010 8:11:46 AM *Subject:* Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
I have been reading Alan Kay's Thoughts About Teaching Science and Mathematics To Young Childrenhttp://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2007003a_thoughts.pdf :
I think one of the trickiest issues in this kind of design is an analogy to the learning of science itself, and that is *"how much should the learners/users have to do by themselves vs. how much should the curriculum/system do for them?"* Most computer users have been mostly exposed to "productivity tools" in which as many things as possible have been done for them. The kinds of educational environments we are talking about here are a*t their best when the learner does the important parts by themselves, and any black or translucent boxes serve only on the side and not at the center of the learning.* What is the center and *what is the side will shift as the learning progresses, and this has to be accommodated.
By exposing everything in Etoys as "First Principles" (which in this particular case I understand to mean, that we have a minimal set of scripting tiles and objects from which everything can be built) we avoid the "productivity tools" issue because everything is exposed. It is also a beautiful, elegant and exposes a powerful idea.
The challenge in a system where everything is done from "First Principles" is that when you are designing an"educational environment" "lesson", or "Artifact" ( better terms might be "playthink" and/or "tool to think with"), it can take a lot of work to build those preferably translucent boxes. And to paraphrase another Alan Kay quote on user interface design: "If it takes one step I'll do it, If it takes two steps I might do it, if it takes three or more steps forget about it!"
No, I am not arguing to make things easy for everyone, we need find ways to get kids to have "hard fun." Hard work and ragging a problem are good habits. I also strongly believe that giving kids a "blank canvas" and a great set of brushes and paints is an excellent and preffered method, but not the only one we should use.
I am arguing (and struggling) with is how in a "First Principle" system like Etoys, we can find ways to make it easier for teachers/designers (ie: make them more productive). I fear I see in some folks (none on this email list of course) a tendency towards what I initially saw (and fell into myself) as the constructivism trap. Where I encountered people who thought kids should construct all knowledge themselves from Scratch (pun intended ;). As I recall Alan (and others pointing out) we can't expect kids to do that, they will repeat the same mistakes people did over thousands of years. My initial thoughts are a repository of Artifacts that teachers can use along with a set of scripts (the problem with the set of scripts idea is that the scripts in Etoys are not decoupled from the ?morphs? (not sure of the correct term here, but basically the pixels visually representing the object). Bert's idea that we have a Player Variable and the scripts that operate on it is a good one, but I think there may be some bugs there, need to test more.
Now I will more directly address Kathleen's question: "What do you mean by "Artifacts". I will switch from "Artifacts" to the term "Playthinks" (which I encountered in the "The Big Book of Brain Gameshttp://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-Brain-Games-Mathematics/dp/0761134662" by Ivan Moscovich). One of the best and simplest "Playthinks" for teaching I ever encountered was Robert B. Davis' classroom warm-up (which I showed at Squeakfest and have wrote about herehttp://mrstevesscience.blogspot.com/2009/12/taking-tic-tac-toe-to-next-level-if-you.html.) Basically it involves drawing on the board a 4 x 4 grid
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Then having kids pick two numbers and using those two numbers as X and Y counting from 0 at the origin point in the lower left and then If they land on the board marking an X or O until one team wins. Some of the keys to this "Playthink" are:
- you let kids puzzle it out for themselves, they figure out the
rules, you don't tell them
- it contains a powerful idea
- it can be easily extended to other concepts (negative numbers, a
number is all the ways you can name it, is this game fair ...)
- *its fun *
Other examples of "Playthinks" would be cuisenaire rods, pentagrams, area blocks, other good "virtual manipulatives" and my feeble attempts Circle Explorer http://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10212 and Pattern Blocks and Toolshttp://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10216 .
*Bert*, your comments on SQ-749 sparked my writing this, I will address it more specifically in a separate email after some more thought.
Including *Alan* so he can correct any misinterpretations and hopefully comment
FYI: A lot of other excelent writings from VPRI are herehttp://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php, most are Computer Science related but a number deal with educational issues and Etoys.
Stephen
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.dewrote:
On 12.08.2010, at 10:32, Steve Thomas wrote:
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 3:32 AM, Bert Freudenberg <
bert@freudenbergs.de> wrote:
This would likely be simple to implement, but could break existing
projects. E.g. the morphing stuff in the showcase. Maybe you could take a look?
Checked "Morphing" by Kazuhiro Abe and that should be fine. Each
Polygon in the holder has the same number of vertices and the script simple changes the positions of the vertices one at a time.
"The Walkers" and associated remixes by P.A. Dreyfus uses a special
category "morphing" which would be great to get into Etoys (although I would suggest the addition of some way to show/manage the frames) to make the invisible more visible and to make it easier to create these kind of animations. Anyway, whether this would be a problem or not depends on how it is implemented. If he stores complete information about the polygon in each frame, I see no problems. If he only stores differences and adds/removes/repositions each vertex that MAY cause a problem.
Anyway if it is a simple change and you can make it, I think I can
easily test the change by opening the project, then file-in the changes and see if anything breaks. Or you could also ask P.A. Dreyfus (master of polygon's and connectors) what he thinks as he knows and can check the changes against his implementation.
Stephen
Thinking about this more I do not like the proposal. It would makes the system less predictable.
Having the new vertex remain at the same position is the only sensible choice. It matches the "copy" behavior of regular objects, which also appear in the same position. It would not scale anyway - see this image where I only inserted 4 vertices. The position quickly converges to the next vertex position.
Also, I'd argue that "add a vertex at beginning" and "add a vertex at end" tiles are not needed in the first place. To be useful they would, as you noticed, have to be "set cursor to beginning and insert vertex" and "set cursor to end and insert vertex", because otherwise one cannot assign their position immediately. But that makes them perform two operations that are available separately. There is no good reason to coalesce those steps into one.
In any case, inserting a vertex should not change the cursor. If you want a cursor change to occur, insert a tile.
So my counter-proposal is: remove the "add vertex at beginning" and "add vertex at end" tiles. (to not break existing projects, the tiles would only be hidden)
- Bert -
etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
Sure ... one way to think of this is that you can start with a sample text object that you modify to make a "prototype" of the ones you want to use as numeric labels. Make them wide enough, center the text, make the background the same as the background of the screen (so it will make a nice space when it is positioned over a line, etc.)
You can put this in a variable and then make copies (instances) of it to actually use as labels.
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________ From: Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com To: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com Cc: Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu; etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org Sent: Mon, August 23, 2010 10:59:02 AM Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
Minor point of clarification, it works when you change the width of the text Object and center the text, which is the solution Bert came up with and I will use for now.
It doesn't work if you unless you change the width attribute of the text object and center the text. See attached screenshot.
See attached screenshot
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 11:23 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
Hi Stephen
It seems to work (see attached picture).
Remember that "text is text", if you want to use it as a label then you can center it by using the FF menu.
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________ From: Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com
To: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com Cc: Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu; etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org Sent: Mon, August 23, 2010 5:48:07 AM
Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
I think I'm not understanding your graphing example. It is "pretty easy" to position text objects containing numbers (you can adjust the centers of any object and the x and y coordinates can have some arithmetic done to them with results put in the numeric value). Please give me more info here.
The problem seems to be only with centering 1 character text. To recreate, draw a vertical line, create a text object "1" and set both to the the same X value. Two or more characters align and are not an issue.
Stephen
________________________________ From: Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com
To: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com; Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu Cc: etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org Sent: Sun, August 22, 2010 8:37:21 PM
Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
Hi Alan,
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
A good slogan for teaching, pedagogy, and curriculum design is "When should it be easy, and when should it be hard?".
This, for me at least, is hard to figure out ahead of time when designing a lesson. I am much better when I interact with the kids and can improvise on the spot.
The notion here is that for education to be transformative, you wind up as a different "better" person than you were, and this means that certain difficulties were very important to your learning -- the stuff that was "easy" you could already do (and some of the easy stuff is not what you want to aim at). Building knowledge and skills to get fluent at handling difficulties (and in some case rendering them non-difficult) is a key for much important learning.
On the other hand, gratiutous non-productive difficulties are to be avoided because they generally both distract and occupy " thinking chunks" that one needs for the important stuff.
(I don't recognize my quote that was paraphrased) It comes from a video I found in the Bell Labs library around 84-86 (not sure of video date). You were talking about User Interface design and my biological memory recalls you refering to using a mouse and saying "If I can do it in one click, I'll do it. If it takes two clicks, I might do it. If it takes three or more clicks, I probably won't do it". I have used and attributed it to you a number of times since. If I am in error please let me know and I will self correct.
I really could use Gorden Bell's E-Memory. Hopefully you are heeding his advice and collecting your E-memory so that we may search and study it. One way to do this is anytime you give an interview, presentation etc where it is recorded, request a copy of the recording and all rights to distribute as you see fit. Also be sure they video your presentation and not just you so we can see what you are referring to. It would be nice if we had text versions of those interviews. I am working on transcribing the interview you gave at Natural math and its time consuming. I have a friend who works on Google speech recognition software and would try and send him a copy, but Ellumintate doesn't seem to have a way to extract the audio.
Adults tend to be the biggest problems when trying to help children learn things. It's the adults who generally don't want to do the work and don't see many things as fun. Kids (and people in general) can spend a lot of time focussed and doing when they are having fun.
If not Adults, who? If the goal is transformation I see Adults as part of the solution. So does labeling them as part of the problem (which I am NOT disagreeing with) help or hinder transformation?
I ask this because I see a lot of teacher bashing which I believe hinders our cause much more than helps it.
Another choice besides adults is older kids, I have seen this succesfully used in Scouting and in a public speaking conference my kids attended this past weekend. They tend to listen to older kids more and the older kids realize the importance of fun. The key here, as with adults, is guidance and training.
Constructivism (one of many such terms I don't use because they have lost their meanings) doesn't mean discovery from scratch (this is a huge confusion many people have), but does mean "understand and clarifying by making a careful descriptive model".
This can be done with English and writing (it is what descriptive, expositional, and argumentative writing are supposed to be about). It can be done with mathematics. It can be done in many cases with physical construction materials. And a lot can be done in terms of computer programs.
Thank you I really hadn't thought of this before and it is an excellent point (ie: something I can use with my kids).
I will look for ways my kids can learn this.
I like the Montessori curriculum approach of making a carefully designed environment for the chilldren that allows choice on their part and allows limited the degrees of freedom on the educator's part.
The problem I struggle with is how to design the environment and what games, playthinks, problems, etc to use.
One of the best projects we've ever designed is the Galilean Gravity one -- and it illustrates what you have to do with guidance on the one hand and space to play on the other to enormously raise the probability that most children will be able to see and understand what is going on without having to give them the "answer" to memorize.
I love that project and I find it extremely frustrating. Frustrating because I really want to do it with my kids, but it is really really hard to do in Etoys. The hard part being importing the video. The reason for this I believe is that the video player only supports MPEG.The idea that kids take their own videos and then analyze them is an excellent approach. Avigail Snir had a wonderful example of using video at Squeakfest. But as I understand it, even she had a lot of problems trying to convert the video into MPEG and even more frustrating is she is having trouble sharing it with the world so other teachers could see it and be inspired.
One of the keys in the early Montessori schools was the intense comprehensive training of the Montessori teachers -- and the lack of the equivalent of this in most of today's schools is a huge problem.
I have also been thinking about using scripts (the theatrical kind) and cue's to look for with scripted responses as a way of teaching. Perhaps Actors would be good teachers hmmmm need to flesh out the idea more.
The scripts in Etoys are independent of the visible appearance of the object they are attached to (the objects' "costumes" can be changed at will -- and this is how "frame animation" is done in Etoys).
I'm not quite understanding what it is that you would like for teachers beyond a repository of projects with extensive notes about how they were made and how to make them. A repository of projects is good, but I would add a repository of objects, sets of objects and scripts. Ie: I think unit of "things you can share/store/easily re-use" is too large. I write this then ask myself, why do I feel this way? I think it goes back to the point you verbalized much better than me "It gets annoying after the first few times". I may be thinking of what you refer to later in the email as "packaging up" a solution.
I would like to be able to re-use and share those solutions (especially since Etoys lets me look inside and modify them). The ability to look inside and modify them is why I would prefer "artifacts" (as discussed in previous emails and built by Hilaire as part of iStoa) be created with scripting tiles as opposed to doing so in squeak. This would allow teacher to build a set of virtual manipulatives that others could modify or just look inside and figure out how they work. One response I received was that this would not scale, but frankly I don't understand why not.
"Packaging a solution" would also let you develop a curriculum where kids built their own tools (ex: a graphing tool) and re-use them in other projects. The one tricky part of the graphing tool is labeling the number lines (trying to align the text is hard, at least I have not found a simple solution) so perhaps a number line object would be needed.
If "learning by making" is a good idea, then shouldn't teachers learn new ideas about Etoys by making them (but with lots of guidance)?
Okay my turn to not quite understand: Yes I agree "learning by making" is a good idea. But should teachers and learners have to make everything from first principles? Who has the time?
Would teachers not benefit from using "great literture" created by people who were PUFx's (ie: had a Profound Understanding of Fundamental <subject matter>)? I have a friend at work who while at Stanford and did very well in Organic Chemistry, he thought the reason he did so well was he had 7 or 8 core concepts from which he could derive the rest. He decided to try and teach those concepts and when and how to use them to some of the other students to see if they could use them and "transform". It worked well and I think this idea has some merit. Unfortunately he had a head injury and can't remember them. My challenge is to find sets of core ideas and how to use them, then figure out how to present them in an age appropriate manner.
I also think you made a good point in the Natural Math interview when you mentioned Seymour Papert's comment that it doesn't much matter what mathematics we teach them as long as they are learning to reason like a mathematician.
On the other hand, there are any number of things in the Etoys design itself that could be vastly improved to help both adult and child learning, and also for them to make better extensions.
Yes, the question I am struggling with are which are the important ones worth doing first. To think about that I am considering imposing upon myself something similar to the Warren Buffet advise to "give myself a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches - representing all the investments I could make in a lifetime". I think instead I will try and limit myself to three requests for the rest of the year. Those who know me know how hard it will be to impose that constraint. But one way would be allow myself to discuss many possible improvement (which helps me think about them) and then only pick three to request.
For example, I do all my talk presentations using Etoys and I write scripts to sequence "builds" of additive visual material to the slide (Powerpoint has a feature for doing this that is more convenient for some goals and simply won't allow others). It is very instructive to do this by hand a few times, and then gets annoying. Agreed.
Etoys does not have a good extension mechanism for "packaging up" a solution to "slide builds" that can then be used as a feature. This is a real sin against our own precepts. The lack of it is due to EToys being thought of as temporary and of limited scope at Disney. It is terrible that we don't have it now.
I think Ricardo's GSoC Morph I/O may help solve at least part of the problem. You can save an object (including a playfield and its embedded objects) in a file and import it later. I have used it a number of times and find it very useful.
Why don't we do it now? Because we've been trying to move on to the next design since before OLPC came along. And so forth.
I look forward to seeing the next design (I have only caught glimpses from what I have read on the VPRI site and reading into emails and discussions). Is there a time frame when we can expect to see it? All that said, I think the most important thing to work on now is great content (projects, lesson plans, screencasts, etc.)
Many Cheers for all you have done and continue to do, Stephen
________________________________ From: Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com
To: Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu Cc: etoys-dev dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org; Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com Sent: Thu, August 12, 2010 8:11:46 AM Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
I have been reading Alan Kay's Thoughts About Teaching Science and Mathematics To Young Children:
I think one of the trickiest issues in this kind of design is an analogy to the learning of science itself, and that is "how much should the learners/users have to do by themselves vs. how much should the curriculum/system do for them?" Most computer users have been mostly exposed to "productivity tools" in which as many things as possible have been done for them. The kinds of educational environments we are talking about here are at their best when the learner does the important parts by themselves, and any black or translucent boxes serve only on the side and not at the center of the learning. What is the center and what is the side will shift as the learning progresses, and this has to be accommodated.
By exposing everything in Etoys as "First Principles" (which in this particular case I understand to mean, that we have a minimal set of scripting tiles and objects from which everything can be built) we avoid the "productivity tools" issue because everything is exposed. It is also a beautiful, elegant and exposes a powerful idea.
The challenge in a system where everything is done from "First Principles" is that when you are designing an"educational environment" "lesson", or "Artifact" ( better terms might be "playthink" and/or "tool to think with"), it can take a lot of work to build those preferably translucent boxes. And to paraphrase another Alan Kay quote on user interface design: "If it takes one step I'll do it, If it takes two steps I might do it, if it takes three or more steps forget about it!"
No, I am not arguing to make things easy for everyone, we need find ways to get kids to have "hard fun." Hard work and ragging a problem are good habits. I also strongly believe that giving kids a "blank canvas" and a great set of brushes and paints is an excellent and preffered method, but not the only one we should use.
I am arguing (and struggling) with is how in a "First Principle" system like Etoys, we can find ways to make it easier for teachers/designers (ie: make them more productive). I fear I see in some folks (none on this email list of course) a tendency towards what I initially saw (and fell into myself) as the constructivism trap. Where I encountered people who thought kids should construct all knowledge themselves from Scratch (pun intended ;). As I recall Alan (and others pointing out) we can't expect kids to do that, they will repeat the same mistakes people did over thousands of years. My initial thoughts are a repository of Artifacts that teachers can use along with a set of scripts (the problem with the set of scripts idea is that the scripts in Etoys are not decoupled from the ?morphs? (not sure of the correct term here, but basically the pixels visually representing the object). Bert's idea that we have a Player Variable and the scripts that operate on it is a good one, but I think there may be some bugs there, need to test more.
Now I will more directly address Kathleen's question: "What do you mean by "Artifacts". I will switch from "Artifacts" to the term "Playthinks" (which I encountered in the "The Big Book of Brain Games" by Ivan Moscovich). One of the best and simplest "Playthinks" for teaching I ever encountered was Robert B. Davis' classroom warm-up (which I showed at Squeakfest and have wrote about here.) Basically it involves drawing on the board a 4 x 4 grid . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Then having kids pick two numbers and using those two numbers as X and Y counting from 0 at the origin point in the lower left and then If they land on the board marking an X or O until one team wins. Some of the keys to this "Playthink" are: * you let kids puzzle it out for themselves, they figure out the rules, you don't tell them * it contains a powerful idea * it can be easily extended to other concepts (negative numbers, a number is all the ways you can name it, is this game fair ...) * its fun Other examples of "Playthinks" would be cuisenaire rods, pentagrams, area blocks, other good "virtual manipulatives" and my feeble attempts Circle Explorer and Pattern Blocks and Tools.
Bert, your comments on SQ-749 sparked my writing this, I will address it more specifically in a separate email after some more thought.
Including Alan so he can correct any misinterpretations and hopefully comment
FYI: A lot of other excelent writings from VPRI are here, most are Computer Science related but a number deal with educational issues and Etoys.
Stephen On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de wrote:
On 12.08.2010, at 10:32, Steve Thomas wrote:
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 3:32 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de
wrote:
This would likely be simple to implement, but could break existing projects. E.g. the morphing stuff in the showcase. Maybe you could take a look?
Checked "Morphing" by Kazuhiro Abe and that should be fine. Each Polygon in the holder has the same number of vertices and the script simple changes the positions of the vertices one at a time.
"The Walkers" and associated remixes by P.A. Dreyfus uses a special category "morphing" which would be great to get into Etoys (although I would suggest the addition of some way to show/manage the frames) to make the invisible more visible and to make it easier to create these kind of animations. Anyway, whether this would be a problem or not depends on how it is implemented. If he stores complete information about the polygon in each frame, I see no problems. If he only stores differences and adds/removes/repositions each vertex that MAY cause a problem.
Anyway if it is a simple change and you can make it, I think I can easily test the change by opening the project, then file-in the changes and see if anything breaks. Or you could also ask P.A. Dreyfus (master of polygon's and connectors) what he thinks as he knows and can check the changes against his implementation.
Stephen
Thinking about this more I do not like the proposal. It would makes the system less predictable.
Having the new vertex remain at the same position is the only sensible choice. It matches the "copy" behavior of regular objects, which also appear in the same position. It would not scale anyway - see this image where I only inserted 4 vertices. The position quickly converges to the next vertex position.
Also, I'd argue that "add a vertex at beginning" and "add a vertex at end" tiles are not needed in the first place. To be useful they would, as you noticed, have to be "set cursor to beginning and insert vertex" and "set cursor to end and insert vertex", because otherwise one cannot assign their position immediately. But that makes them perform two operations that are available separately. There is no good reason to coalesce those steps into one.
In any case, inserting a vertex should not change the cursor. If you want a cursor change to occur, insert a tile.
So my counter-proposal is: remove the "add vertex at beginning" and "add vertex at end" tiles. (to not break existing projects, the tiles would only be hidden)
- Bert -
etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
if you send the Elluminate video to me, we can certainly do a transcript (there is a very speedy and reasonably inexpensive transcription company here in LA).
Go to this page http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/Important+questions and at the top is a link to the video
*Recording* Full recording: voice, web tour, text chat.https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2010-08-07.0830.M.B41FC4AB0A3565F8BCAE1B600D6595.vcr&sid=2008350
------------------------------
*From:* Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com *To:* Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com; Bert Freudenberg < bert@freudenbergs.de>; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu *Cc:* etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland < squeakland@squeakland.org> *Sent:* Sun, August 22, 2010 8:37:21 PM
*Subject:* Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
Hi Alan,
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
A good slogan for teaching, pedagogy, and curriculum design is "When should it be easy, and when should it be hard?".
This, for me at least, is hard to figure out ahead of time when designing a lesson. I am much better when I interact with the kids and can improvise on the spot.
The notion here is that for education to be transformative, you wind up as a different "better" person than you were, and this means that certain difficulties were very important to your learning -- the stuff that was "easy" you could already do (and some of the easy stuff is not what you want to aim at). Building knowledge and skills to get fluent at handling difficulties (and in some case rendering them non-difficult) is a key for much important learning.
On the other hand, gratiutous non-productive difficulties are to be avoided because they generally both distract and occupy " thinking chunks" that one needs for the important stuff.
(I don't recognize my quote that was paraphrased)
It comes from a video I found in the Bell Labs library around 84-86 (not sure of video date). You were talking about User Interface design and my biological memory recalls you refering to using a mouse and saying "If I can do it in one click, I'll do it. If it takes two clicks, I might do it. If it takes three or more clicks, I probably won't do it". I have used and attributed it to you a number of times since. If I am in error please let me know and I will self correct.
I really could use Gorden Bell's E-Memory. Hopefully you are heeding his advice and collecting your E-memory so that we may search and study it. One way to do this is anytime you give an interview, presentation etc where it is recorded, request a copy of the recording and all rights to distribute as you see fit. Also be sure they video your presentation and not just you so we can see what you are referring to. It would be nice if we had text versions of those interviews. I am working on transcribing the interview you gave at Natural mathhttp://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/Important+questions and its time consuming. I have a friend who works on Google speech recognition software and would try and send him a copy, but Ellumintate doesn't seem to have a way to extract the audio.
Adults tend to be the biggest problems when trying to help children learn things. It's the adults who generally don't want to do the work and don't see many things as fun. Kids (and people in general) can spend a lot of time focussed and doing when they are having fun.
If not Adults, who? If the goal is transformation I see Adults as part of the solution. So does labeling them as part of the problem (which I am NOT disagreeing with) help or hinder transformation?
I ask this because I see a lot of teacher bashing which I believe hinders
our cause much more than helps it.
Another choice besides adults is older kids, I have seen this succesfully used in Scouting and in a public speaking conference my kids attended this past weekend. They tend to listen to older kids more and the older kids realize the importance of fun. The key here, as with adults, is guidance and training.
Constructivism (one of many such terms I don't use because they have lost their meanings) doesn't mean discovery from scratch (this is a huge confusion many people have), but does mean "understand and clarifying by making a careful descriptive model".
This can be done with English and writing (it is what descriptive, expositional, and argumentative writing are supposed to be about). It can be done with mathematics. It can be done in many cases with physical construction materials. And a lot can be done in terms of computer programs.
Thank you I really hadn't thought of this before and it is an excellent point (ie: something I can use with my kids).
I will look for ways my kids can learn this.
I like the Montessori curriculum approach of making a carefully designed environment for the chilldren that allows choice on their part and allows limited the degrees of freedom on the educator's part.
The problem I struggle with is how to design the environment and what games, playthinks, problems, etc to use.
One of the best projects we've ever designed is the Galilean Gravity one -- and it illustrates what you have to do with guidance on the one hand and space to play on the other to enormously raise the probability that most children will be able to see and understand what is going on without having to give them the "answer" to memorize.
I love that project and I find it extremely frustrating. Frustrating because I really want to do it with my kids, but it is really really hard to do in Etoys. The hard part being importing the video. The reason for this I believe is that the video player only supports MPEG.
The idea that kids take their own videos and then analyze them is an
excellent approach. Avigail Snir had a wonderful example of using video at Squeakfest. But as I understand it, even she had a lot of problems trying to convert the video into MPEG and even more frustrating is she is having trouble sharing it with the world so other teachers could see it and be inspired.
One of the keys in the early Montessori schools was the intense
comprehensive training of the Montessori teachers -- and the lack of the equivalent of this in most of today's schools is a huge problem.
I have also been thinking about using scripts (the theatrical kind) and cue's to look for with scripted responses as a way of teaching. Perhaps Actors would be good teachers hmmmm need to flesh out the idea more.
The scripts in Etoys are independent of the visible appearance of the object they are attached to (the objects' "costumes" can be changed at will -- and this is how "frame animation" is done in Etoys).
I'm not quite understanding what it is that you would like for teachers
beyond a repository of projects with extensive notes about how they were made and how to make them.
A repository of projects is good, but I would add a repository of objects, sets of objects and scripts. Ie: I think unit of "things you can share/store/easily re-use" is too large. I write this then ask myself, why do I feel this way? I think it goes back to the point you verbalized much better than me "It gets annoying after the first few times". I may be thinking of what you refer to later in the email as "packaging up" a solution.
I would like to be able to re-use and share those solutions (especially since Etoys lets me look inside and modify them). The ability to look inside and modify them is why I would prefer "artifacts" (as discussed in previous emails and built by Hilaire as part of iStoa) be created with scripting tiles as opposed to doing so in squeak. This would allow teacher to build a set of virtual manipulatives that others could modify or just look inside and figure out how they work. One response I received was that this would not scale, but frankly I don't understand why not.
"Packaging a solution" would also let you develop a curriculum where kids built their own tools (ex: a graphing tool) and re-use them in other projects. The one tricky part of the graphing tool is labeling the number lines (trying to align the text is hard, at least I have not found a simple solution) so perhaps a number line object would be needed.
If "learning by making" is a good idea, then shouldn't teachers learn new ideas about Etoys by making them (but with lots of guidance)?
Okay my turn to not quite understand: Yes I agree "learning by making" is a good idea. But should teachers and learners have to make everything from first principles? Who has the time?
Would teachers not benefit from using "great literture" created by people who were PUFx's (ie: had a Profound Understanding of Fundamental <subject matter>)?
I have a friend at work who while at Stanford and did very well in Organic
Chemistry, he thought the reason he did so well was he had 7 or 8 core concepts from which he could derive the rest. He decided to try and teach those concepts and when and how to use them to some of the other students to see if they could use them and "transform". It worked well and I think this idea has some merit. Unfortunately he had a head injury and can't remember them. My challenge is to find sets of core ideas and how to use them, then figure out how to present them in an age appropriate manner.
I also think you made a good point in the Natural Math interview when you mentioned Seymour Papert's comment that it doesn't much matter what mathematics we teach them as long as they are learning to reason like a mathematician.
On the other hand, there are any number of things in the Etoys design
itself that could be vastly improved to help both adult and child learning, and also for them to make better extensions.
Yes, the question I am struggling with are which are the important ones worth doing first. To think about that I am considering imposing upon myself something similar to the Warren Buffet advise to "give myself a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches - representing all the investments I could make in a lifetime". I think instead I will try and limit myself to three requests for the rest of the year. Those who know me know how hard it will be to impose that constraint. But one way would be allow myself to discuss many possible improvement (which helps me think about them) and then only pick three to request.
For example, I do all my talk presentations using Etoys and I write scripts to sequence "builds" of additive visual material to the slide (Powerpoint has a feature for doing this that is more convenient for some goals and simply won't allow others). It is very instructive to do this by hand a few times, and then gets annoying.
Agreed.
Etoys does not have a good extension mechanism for "packaging up" a solution to "slide builds" that can then be used as a feature. This is a real sin against our own precepts. The lack of it is due to EToys being thought of as temporary and of limited scope at Disney. It is terrible that we don't have it now.
I think Ricardo's GSoC Morph I/O may help solve at least part of the problem. You can save an object (including a playfield and its embedded objects) in a file and import it later. I have used it a number of times and find it very useful.
Why don't we do it now? Because we've been trying to move on to the next
design since before OLPC came along. And so forth.
I look forward to seeing the next design (I have only caught glimpses from what I have read on the VPRI site and reading into emails and discussions). Is there a time frame when we can expect to see it?
All that said, I think the most important thing to work on now is great content (projects, lesson plans, screencasts, etc.)
Many Cheers for all you have done and continue to do,
Stephen
*From:* Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com *To:* Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness < kharness@illinois.edu> *Cc:* etoys-dev dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland < squeakland@squeakland.org>; Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com *Sent:* Thu, August 12, 2010 8:11:46 AM *Subject:* Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
I have been reading Alan Kay's Thoughts About Teaching Science and Mathematics To Young Childrenhttp://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2007003a_thoughts.pdf :
I think one of the trickiest issues in this kind of design is an analogy to the learning of science itself, and that is *"how much should the learners/users have to do by themselves vs. how much should the curriculum/system do for them?"* Most computer users have been mostly exposed to "productivity tools" in which as many things as possible have been done for them. The kinds of educational environments we are talking about here are a*t their best when the learner does the important parts by themselves, and any black or translucent boxes serve only on the side and not at the center of the learning.* What is the center and *what is the side will shift as the learning progresses, and this has to be accommodated.
By exposing everything in Etoys as "First Principles" (which in this particular case I understand to mean, that we have a minimal set of scripting tiles and objects from which everything can be built) we avoid the "productivity tools" issue because everything is exposed. It is also a beautiful, elegant and exposes a powerful idea.
The challenge in a system where everything is done from "First Principles" is that when you are designing an"educational environment" "lesson", or "Artifact" ( better terms might be "playthink" and/or "tool to think with"), it can take a lot of work to build those preferably translucent boxes. And to paraphrase another Alan Kay quote on user interface design: "If it takes one step I'll do it, If it takes two steps I might do it, if it takes three or more steps forget about it!"
No, I am not arguing to make things easy for everyone, we need find ways to get kids to have "hard fun." Hard work and ragging a problem are good habits. I also strongly believe that giving kids a "blank canvas" and a great set of brushes and paints is an excellent and preffered method, but not the only one we should use.
I am arguing (and struggling) with is how in a "First Principle" system like Etoys, we can find ways to make it easier for teachers/designers (ie: make them more productive). I fear I see in some folks (none on this email list of course) a tendency towards what I initially saw (and fell into myself) as the constructivism trap. Where I encountered people who thought kids should construct all knowledge themselves from Scratch (pun intended ;). As I recall Alan (and others pointing out) we can't expect kids to do that, they will repeat the same mistakes people did over thousands of years. My initial thoughts are a repository of Artifacts that teachers can use along with a set of scripts (the problem with the set of scripts idea is that the scripts in Etoys are not decoupled from the ?morphs? (not sure of the correct term here, but basically the pixels visually representing the object). Bert's idea that we have a Player Variable and the scripts that operate on it is a good one, but I think there may be some bugs there, need to test more.
Now I will more directly address Kathleen's question: "What do you mean by "Artifacts". I will switch from "Artifacts" to the term "Playthinks" (which I encountered in the "The Big Book of Brain Gameshttp://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-Brain-Games-Mathematics/dp/0761134662" by Ivan Moscovich). One of the best and simplest "Playthinks" for teaching I ever encountered was Robert B. Davis' classroom warm-up (which I showed at Squeakfest and have wrote about herehttp://mrstevesscience.blogspot.com/2009/12/taking-tic-tac-toe-to-next-level-if-you.html.) Basically it involves drawing on the board a 4 x 4 grid
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Then having kids pick two numbers and using those two numbers as X and Y counting from 0 at the origin point in the lower left and then If they land on the board marking an X or O until one team wins. Some of the keys to this "Playthink" are:
- you let kids puzzle it out for themselves, they figure out the
rules, you don't tell them
- it contains a powerful idea
- it can be easily extended to other concepts (negative numbers, a
number is all the ways you can name it, is this game fair ...)
- *its fun *
Other examples of "Playthinks" would be cuisenaire rods, pentagrams, area blocks, other good "virtual manipulatives" and my feeble attempts Circle Explorer http://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10212 and Pattern Blocks and Toolshttp://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10216 .
*Bert*, your comments on SQ-749 sparked my writing this, I will address it more specifically in a separate email after some more thought.
Including *Alan* so he can correct any misinterpretations and hopefully comment
FYI: A lot of other excelent writings from VPRI are herehttp://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php, most are Computer Science related but a number deal with educational issues and Etoys.
Stephen
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.dewrote:
On 12.08.2010, at 10:32, Steve Thomas wrote:
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 3:32 AM, Bert Freudenberg <
bert@freudenbergs.de> wrote:
This would likely be simple to implement, but could break existing
projects. E.g. the morphing stuff in the showcase. Maybe you could take a look?
Checked "Morphing" by Kazuhiro Abe and that should be fine. Each
Polygon in the holder has the same number of vertices and the script simple changes the positions of the vertices one at a time.
"The Walkers" and associated remixes by P.A. Dreyfus uses a special
category "morphing" which would be great to get into Etoys (although I would suggest the addition of some way to show/manage the frames) to make the invisible more visible and to make it easier to create these kind of animations. Anyway, whether this would be a problem or not depends on how it is implemented. If he stores complete information about the polygon in each frame, I see no problems. If he only stores differences and adds/removes/repositions each vertex that MAY cause a problem.
Anyway if it is a simple change and you can make it, I think I can
easily test the change by opening the project, then file-in the changes and see if anything breaks. Or you could also ask P.A. Dreyfus (master of polygon's and connectors) what he thinks as he knows and can check the changes against his implementation.
Stephen
Thinking about this more I do not like the proposal. It would makes the system less predictable.
Having the new vertex remain at the same position is the only sensible choice. It matches the "copy" behavior of regular objects, which also appear in the same position. It would not scale anyway - see this image where I only inserted 4 vertices. The position quickly converges to the next vertex position.
Also, I'd argue that "add a vertex at beginning" and "add a vertex at end" tiles are not needed in the first place. To be useful they would, as you noticed, have to be "set cursor to beginning and insert vertex" and "set cursor to end and insert vertex", because otherwise one cannot assign their position immediately. But that makes them perform two operations that are available separately. There is no good reason to coalesce those steps into one.
In any case, inserting a vertex should not change the cursor. If you want a cursor change to occur, insert a tile.
So my counter-proposal is: remove the "add vertex at beginning" and "add vertex at end" tiles. (to not break existing projects, the tiles would only be hidden)
- Bert -
etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
Re Galilean gravity ... For now, I suggest the much easier route of making "jpeg movies" (they are just a folder of images whose names sort in order). The Etoys movie player has an option for playing such jpeg files.
How does this work? I created a folder with a set of jpeg files.
From the MPEG movie Player, I clicked on the *Menu* button, clicked on *
advanced* then on *create JPEG movie from folder of frames*. I then navigated to the folder with the jpeg files. Then I had to click on one of the jpg files. I could not figure out how to select multiple files or the folder as a whole. If I clicked on the folder name it simply listed the files in that directory. When I clicked on one file I was asked some questions which I answered but in the end no movie or even any image was displayed.
Anyway, I found a work around which is to put all the images in a holder and set the graphic of a sketch to the "graphic at cursor" of the holder and iterate through the images. But loading all the images was tedious. The advantage of this method (over using an mpeg file) is that when I save the project the "video" is saved with it. When opening a mpeg file using the MPEG player the movie is not saved with the project.
So, I think I'm closer to making this "kid friendly" (so that the stuff that is supposed to be easy is, ie: importing the video frames). I found some free software that works fairly well at exporting JPEG's from a Movie ( avidemux2 http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/) which works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It allows me to easily edit and export the JPEGs from a selection within the movie.
The only other missing piece is a simple way to import the images. A smalltalk script to add the images into a holder (in name order) would be nice :)
Thanks, Stephen
On Saturday 28 Aug 2010 1:13:50 pm Steve Thomas wrote:
The only other missing piece is a simple way to import the images. A smalltalk script to add the images into a holder (in name order) would be nice :)
Did you try dragging all images and dropping them into Etoys? You may also want to turn on the Holder's "show thumbnails" option.
Unfortunately, images dropped into a holder become SketchMorphs in World. They don't get into the holder. You will have to do this manually :-(.
HTH .. Subbu
Thanks to all, I finally found a simple method to allow kids to create their own videos and import them into Etoys. I'm finally coming to the realization that almost every time I ask for a smalltalk script it means I'm just really frustrated, need to step away for a while and think harder. There have been only two cases I can remember where smalltalk was the only solution.
Basically it boils down to implementing Alan's suggestion of exporting the JPEGs out of the video and Subbu triggered the idea of after I drag all the images in, I can simply drag select the images and drop them in a holder (before I was doing it one at a time).
So far this works well, need to test on Windows and with video formats other than AVI. Will post a how to after some more testing and playing.
Stephen
On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 12:57 PM, K. K. Subramaniam kksubbu.ml@gmail.comwrote:
On Saturday 28 Aug 2010 1:13:50 pm Steve Thomas wrote:
The only other missing piece is a simple way to import the images. A smalltalk script to add the images into a holder (in name order) would
be
nice :)
Did you try dragging all images and dropping them into Etoys? You may also want to turn on the Holder's "show thumbnails" option.
Unfortunately, images dropped into a holder become SketchMorphs in World. They don't get into the holder. You will have to do this manually :-(.
HTH .. Subbu _______________________________________________ etoys-dev mailing list etoys-dev@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/etoys-dev
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
Please do follow through with your plan of asking for 3 (or 20) things
Here are my list (blew past 3 and 20 ;)
1. Make it easier for kids to debug, "see" how scripts work and start "playing computer" in their heads. 1. Visual debugger that allows single stepping scripts, similar to the way Scratch works, also the ability to drag out a section of a script similar to Scratch. I have seen kids use both methods to debug and figure out what is going on and its very effective. One improvement over Scratch would be a method where it doesn't execute the next tile until you click a particular key, so kids can control the pace. 2. Ability for kids to build their own set of tools to reuse and share. 1. The ability to create your own scripting tiles that can be placed inside any script. They would have a slightly different look so you can tell they are user created scripting tiles. They would also have the option to allow you to "look inside" and see how they work and modify them if you like. 2. Scripts are decoupled from ?Players? and can be copied to and/or associated with multiple objects. WIth appropriate kid friendly error messages, ex: if you have a polygon tile associated with a non polygon object. 3. Object Repository - a location where you can store/share/retrieve objects you and others have created. 3. Improvements to "Playfield/Holder" so that it can be used as a table/spreadsheet. 1. Auto-adjust width to width of item in the holder 2. fixed column/row height/width 3. Ability to reference other cells in the table 4. Ability to see/set padding sizes between objects 4. Ability to send emails from a project and/or store a file with results that can be read 5. I/O functions for data collection, configuration, communications 6. The ability to easily reference a set of objects. I have at times wanted to iterate through a list of objects to lock/unlock them, set color/size or run some script on them. 7. All objects show collections category when you drop items into them. 8. Connector Labels that are placed near the middle of the line (vs where the mouse is) 9. The ability make other objects siblings after they are created. I often realize after the fact that I would like a set of objects (with different costumes) to be siblings. 10. Tiles to set Playfield gridding size and tiles for other menu items that you currently can't script. (although I noticed that you can get the halo for a menu item and fire it which works providing you don't have to enter values like in "set grid spacing". 11. More Explicit reference to Messaging (Scratch uses terms like broadcast/receive) I guess this is also coming from the fact that it took me a while to figure out the behavior of some of the scripting tiles.
More Fun Stuff:
1. Robotics Interfaces: Arduino and Lego 2. An "ask" tile to get user input 3. Abiltity to glide to a position in X secs 4. Ability to Say a Speech Bubble for X secs, ... 5. Ability to sequence sounds and speech bubbles (ex: play sound until done [then execute next tile]) 6. tile(s) similar to Scratch's (change <color|fisheye|whirl|pixelate|mosaic|brightness|ghost> effect by [x]) 7. Better sound and camera/video support. 8. Font Control in scripting tiles 9. Tile to "grab" a section of the screen (from x,y to x', y'). What I am thinking of here is I like to encourage kids to a) make appropriate comparisons, so seeing the results of multiple modeling runs side by side would be useful. Also for combinations/permutations such as given two/three/four/... color blocks how many different stacks can you make two/three/four/... high. This could probably be done by simply having them stack the blocks in a playfield and copy the playfield (scaled down) to a holder. Not sure about this one.
User Interface Improvements:
1. Improved Visual Clues when placing items in scripts and Holders to see where they are going to be placed. Too many kids struggle with this and get frustrated (which I think is a big part of why folks say "Scratch is easier") ex: 1. scripting tiles don't go where they want 2. An item is placed int the wrong spot in a holder 3. They add an item to an expression instead of being able to change a value 2. Access to "Visual Help" at the scripting tile/menu item as opposed to in quick guides. I am thinking here of an animation of what the tiles/menu items actually do, with more than one example so kids get the idea their are multiple ways to use them not just one way. Similar to the ideas/work of a fellow (whose name I can't remember :( but he did some smalltalk work similar to PA Dreyfus' project Kids In Cloudshttp://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=10265 he wrote a paper on cartoon communication or something like that, I am sure you folks will know who I am talking about when you look at Kids in Clouds (Bert showed me his work at Squeakfest), if you can get me his name I would appreciate it I want to re-read some of his papers and I can't find them :( Scratch does this with option click on a tile to get a menu which includes help. But instead of a static help message, animated help with multiple examples and try this or what would happen if you tried ... or how could you use this to ... (ie: prompts to get the kids to think) 3. Scrollable Viewer if items extend beyond viewable screen space. 4. Simpler entry of expressions in scripting tiles (parentheses is the biggest pain) 5. Scrolling of Script Editors when the script is wider or taller than its holder (ie: playfield or world) 6. In Holders, visualy move items out of the way to see where I am going to insert an item. 7. Kid Friendly Error messages 8. Be able to toggle between full screen and partial screen painting and allow the canvas to be moved 9. Improved Paint tools 10. Ability to flip horizontal/veritcal everything, not just graphics
Thanks, Stephen
On 28.10.2010, at 06:47, Steve Thomas wrote:
Similar to the ideas/work of a fellow (whose name I can't remember :( but he did some smalltalk work similar to PA Dreyfus' project Kids In Clouds he wrote a paper on cartoon communication or something like that, I am sure you folks will know who I am talking about when you look at Kids in Clouds (Bert showed me his work at Squeakfest), if you can get me his name I would appreciate it I want to re-read some of his papers and I can't find them :(
You certainly are looking for Mikael Kindborg's "MagicWords":
I had not seen the Kids In Clouds project yet, way cool! :)
- Bert -
Thanks Steve!
These are very helpful (and many are on our list already). Please don't hesitate to suggest more as we go forward.
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________ From: Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com To: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com Cc: Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu; etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org Sent: Wed, October 27, 2010 9:47:40 PM Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote: Please do follow through with your plan of asking for 3 (or 20) things
Here are my list (blew past 3 and 20 ;) 1. Make it easier for kids to debug, "see" how scripts work and start "playing computer" in their heads. 1. Visual debugger that allows single stepping scripts, similar to the way Scratch works, also the ability to drag out a section of a script similar to Scratch. I have seen kids use both methods to debug and figure out what is going on and its very effective. One improvement over Scratch would be a method where it doesn't execute the next tile until you click a particular key, so kids can control the pace. 2. Ability for kids to build their own set of tools to reuse and share. 1. The ability to create your own scripting tiles that can be placed inside any script. They would have a slightly different look so you can tell they are user created scripting tiles. They would also have the option to allow you to "look inside" and see how they work and modify them if you like. 2. Scripts are decoupled from ?Players? and can be copied to and/or associated with multiple objects. WIth appropriate kid friendly error messages, ex: if you have a polygon tile associated with a non polygon object. 3. Object Repository - a location where you can store/share/retrieve objects you and others have created. 3. Improvements to "Playfield/Holder" so that it can be used as a table/spreadsheet. 1. Auto-adjust width to width of item in the holder 2. fixed column/row height/width 3. Ability to reference other cells in the table 4. Ability to see/set padding sizes between objects 4. Ability to send emails from a project and/or store a file with results that can be read 5. I/O functions for data collection, configuration, communications 6. The ability to easily reference a set of objects. I have at times wanted to iterate through a list of objects to lock/unlock them, set color/size or run some script on them. 7. All objects show collections category when you drop items into them. 8. Connector Labels that are placed near the middle of the line (vs where the mouse is) 9. The ability make other objects siblings after they are created. I often realize after the fact that I would like a set of objects (with different costumes) to be siblings. 10. Tiles to set Playfield gridding size and tiles for other menu items that you currently can't script. (although I noticed that you can get the halo for a menu item and fire it which works providing you don't have to enter values like in "set grid spacing". 11. More Explicit reference to Messaging (Scratch uses terms like broadcast/receive) I guess this is also coming from the fact that it took me a while to figure out the behavior of some of the scripting tiles. More Fun Stuff: 1. Robotics Interfaces: Arduino and Lego 2. An "ask" tile to get user input 3. Abiltity to glide to a position in X secs 4. Ability to Say a Speech Bubble for X secs, ... 5. Ability to sequence sounds and speech bubbles (ex: play sound until done [then execute next tile]) 6. tile(s) similar to Scratch's (change <color|fisheye|whirl|pixelate|mosaic|brightness|ghost> effect by [x]) 7. Better sound and camera/video support. 8. Font Control in scripting tiles 9. Tile to "grab" a section of the screen (from x,y to x', y'). What I am thinking of here is I like to encourage kids to a) make appropriate comparisons, so seeing the results of multiple modeling runs side by side would be useful. Also for combinations/permutations such as given two/three/four/... color blocks how many different stacks can you make two/three/four/... high. This could probably be done by simply having them stack the blocks in a playfield and copy the playfield (scaled down) to a holder. Not sure about this one. User Interface Improvements: 1. Improved Visual Clues when placing items in scripts and Holders to see where they are going to be placed. Too many kids struggle with this and get frustrated (which I think is a big part of why folks say "Scratch is easier") ex: 1. scripting tiles don't go where they want 2. An item is placed int the wrong spot in a holder 3. They add an item to an expression instead of being able to change a value 2. Access to "Visual Help" at the scripting tile/menu item as opposed to in quick guides. I am thinking here of an animation of what the tiles/menu items actually do, with more than one example so kids get the idea their are multiple ways to use them not just one way. Similar to the ideas/work of a fellow (whose name I can't remember :( but he did some smalltalk work similar to PA Dreyfus' project Kids In Clouds he wrote a paper on cartoon communication or something like that, I am sure you folks will know who I am talking about when you look at Kids in Clouds (Bert showed me his work at Squeakfest), if you can get me his name I would appreciate it I want to re-read some of his papers and I can't find them :( Scratch does this with option click on a tile to get a menu which includes help. But instead of a static help message, animated help with multiple examples and try this or what would happen if you tried ... or how could you use this to ... (ie: prompts to get the kids to think) 3. Scrollable Viewer if items extend beyond viewable screen space. 4. Simpler entry of expressions in scripting tiles (parentheses is the biggest pain) 5. Scrolling of Script Editors when the script is wider or taller than its holder (ie: playfield or world) 6. In Holders, visualy move items out of the way to see where I am going to insert an item. 7. Kid Friendly Error messages 8. Be able to toggle between full screen and partial screen painting and allow the canvas to be moved 9. Improved Paint tools 10. Ability to flip horizontal/veritcal everything, not just graphics Thanks, Stephen
Ricardo Moran did some of the things I Steve's list in a different way. He could adapt them. He is interested in another GSoC scholarship next year. Could we make a proposal incorporating some of the items on Steve's list that Richo would want to work on and submit it to ESUG?
Randy
41596 Bald Eagle Drive Bigfork, MN 56628 218-832-3490 Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 28, 2010, at 5:14 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
Thanks Steve!
These are very helpful (and many are on our list already). Please don't hesitate to suggest more as we go forward.
Cheers,
Alan
From: Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com To: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com Cc: Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu; etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org Sent: Wed, October 27, 2010 9:47:40 PM Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote: Please do follow through with your plan of asking for 3 (or 20) things
Here are my list (blew past 3 and 20 ;) Make it easier for kids to debug, "see" how scripts work and start "playing computer" in their heads. Visual debugger that allows single stepping scripts, similar to the way Scratch works, also the ability to drag out a section of a script similar to Scratch. I have seen kids use both methods to debug and figure out what is going on and its very effective. One improvement over Scratch would be a method where it doesn't execute the next tile until you click a particular key, so kids can control the pace. Ability for kids to build their own set of tools to reuse and share. The ability to create your own scripting tiles that can be placed inside any script. They would have a slightly different look so you can tell they are user created scripting tiles. They would also have the option to allow you to "look inside" and see how they work and modify them if you like. Scripts are decoupled from ?Players? and can be copied to and/or associated with multiple objects. WIth appropriate kid friendly error messages, ex: if you have a polygon tile associated with a non polygon object. Object Repository - a location where you can store/share/retrieve objects you and others have created. Improvements to "Playfield/Holder" so that it can be used as a table/spreadsheet. Auto-adjust width to width of item in the holder fixed column/row height/width Ability to reference other cells in the table Ability to see/set padding sizes between objects Ability to send emails from a project and/or store a file with results that can be read I/O functions for data collection, configuration, communications The ability to easily reference a set of objects. I have at times wanted to iterate through a list of objects to lock/unlock them, set color/size or run some script on them. All objects show collections category when you drop items into them. Connector Labels that are placed near the middle of the line (vs where the mouse is) The ability make other objects siblings after they are created. I often realize after the fact that I would like a set of objects (with different costumes) to be siblings. Tiles to set Playfield gridding size and tiles for other menu items that you currently can't script. (although I noticed that you can get the halo for a menu item and fire it which works providing you don't have to enter values like in "set grid spacing". More Explicit reference to Messaging (Scratch uses terms like broadcast/receive) I guess this is also coming from the fact that it took me a while to figure out the behavior of some of the scripting tiles. More Fun Stuff: Robotics Interfaces: Arduino and Lego An "ask" tile to get user input Abiltity to glide to a position in X secs Ability to Say a Speech Bubble for X secs, ... Ability to sequence sounds and speech bubbles (ex: play sound until done [then execute next tile]) tile(s) similar to Scratch's (change <color|fisheye|whirl|pixelate|mosaic|brightness|ghost> effect by [x]) Better sound and camera/video support. Font Control in scripting tiles Tile to "grab" a section of the screen (from x,y to x', y'). What I am thinking of here is I like to encourage kids to a) make appropriate comparisons, so seeing the results of multiple modeling runs side by side would be useful. Also for combinations/permutations such as given two/three/four/... color blocks how many different stacks can you make two/three/four/... high. This could probably be done by simply having them stack the blocks in a playfield and copy the playfield (scaled down) to a holder. Not sure about this one. User Interface Improvements: Improved Visual Clues when placing items in scripts and Holders to see where they are going to be placed. Too many kids struggle with this and get frustrated (which I think is a big part of why folks say "Scratch is easier") ex: scripting tiles don't go where they want An item is placed int the wrong spot in a holder They add an item to an expression instead of being able to change a value Access to "Visual Help" at the scripting tile/menu item as opposed to in quick guides. I am thinking here of an animation of what the tiles/menu items actually do, with more than one example so kids get the idea their are multiple ways to use them not just one way. Similar to the ideas/work of a fellow (whose name I can't remember :( but he did some smalltalk work similar to PA Dreyfus' project Kids In Clouds he wrote a paper on cartoon communication or something like that, I am sure you folks will know who I am talking about when you look at Kids in Clouds (Bert showed me his work at Squeakfest), if you can get me his name I would appreciate it I want to re-read some of his papers and I can't find them :( Scratch does this with option click on a tile to get a menu which includes help. But instead of a static help message, animated help with multiple examples and try this or what would happen if you tried ... or how could you use this to ... (ie: prompts to get the kids to think) Scrollable Viewer if items extend beyond viewable screen space. Simpler entry of expressions in scripting tiles (parentheses is the biggest pain) Scrolling of Script Editors when the script is wider or taller than its holder (ie: playfield or world) In Holders, visualy move items out of the way to see where I am going to insert an item. Kid Friendly Error messages Be able to toggle between full screen and partial screen painting and allow the canvas to be moved Improved Paint tools Ability to flip horizontal/veritcal everything, not just graphics Thanks, Stephen
squeakland mailing list squeakland@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
Sounds good to me!
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________ From: Randy Caton rcaton@cnu.edu To: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com Cc: Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com; etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org Sent: Thu, October 28, 2010 8:22:41 AM Subject: Re: [squeakland] [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
Ricardo Moran did some of the things I Steve's list in a different way. He could adapt them. He is interested in another GSoC scholarship next year. Could we make a proposal incorporating some of the items on Steve's list that Richo would want to work on and submit it to ESUG?
Randy
41596 Bald Eagle Drive Bigfork, MN 56628 218-832-3490 Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 28, 2010, at 5:14 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
Thanks Steve!
These are very helpful (and many are on our list already). Please don't hesitate to suggest more as we go forward.
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________ From: Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.com
To: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com Cc: Bert Freudenberg bert@freudenbergs.de; Kathleen Harness kharness@illinois.edu; etoys-dev etoys-dev@squeakland.org; squeakland squeakland@squeakland.org Sent: Wed, October 27, 2010 9:47:40 PM Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] (SQ-749) and Kathleen's question on "What do you mean by Artifacts?"
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote: Please do follow through with your plan of asking for 3 (or 20) things
Here are my list (blew past 3 and 20 ;) 1. Make it easier for kids to debug, "see" how scripts work and start "playing computer" in their heads. 1. Visual debugger that allows single stepping scripts, similar to the way Scratch works, also the ability to drag out a section of a script similar to Scratch. I have seen kids use both methods to debug and figure out what is going on and its very effective. One improvement over Scratch would be a method where it doesn't execute the next tile until you click a particular key, so kids can control the pace. 2. Ability for kids to build their own set of tools to reuse and share. 1. The ability to create your own scripting tiles that can be placed inside any script. They would have a slightly different look so you can tell they are user created scripting tiles. They would also have the option to allow you to "look inside" and see how they work and modify them if you like. 2. Scripts are decoupled from ?Players? and can be copied to and/or associated with multiple objects. WIth appropriate kid friendly error messages, ex: if you have a polygon tile associated with a non polygon object. 3. Object Repository - a location where you can store/share/retrieve objects you and others have created. 3. Improvements to "Playfield/Holder" so that it can be used as a table/spreadsheet. 1. Auto-adjust width to width of item in the holder 2. fixed column/row height/width 3. Ability to reference other cells in the table 4. Ability to see/set padding sizes between objects 4. Ability to send emails from a project and/or store a file with results that can be read 5. I/O functions for data collection, configuration, communications 6. The ability to easily reference a set of objects. I have at times wanted to iterate through a list of objects to lock/unlock them, set color/size or run some script on them. 7. All objects show collections category when you drop items into them. 8. Connector Labels that are placed near the middle of the line (vs where the mouse is) 9. The ability make other objects siblings after they are created. I often realize after the fact that I would like a set of objects (with different costumes) to be siblings. 10. Tiles to set Playfield gridding size and tiles for other menu items that you currently can't script. (although I noticed that you can get the halo for a menu item and fire it which works providing you don't have to enter values like in "set grid spacing". 11. More Explicit reference to Messaging (Scratch uses terms like broadcast/receive) I guess this is also coming from the fact that it took me a while to figure out the behavior of some of the scripting tiles. More Fun Stuff: 1. Robotics Interfaces: Arduino and Lego 2. An "ask" tile to get user input 3. Abiltity to glide to a position in X secs 4. Ability to Say a Speech Bubble for X secs, ... 5. Ability to sequence sounds and speech bubbles (ex: play sound until done [then execute next tile]) 6. tile(s) similar to Scratch's (change <color|fisheye|whirl|pixelate|mosaic|brightness|ghost> effect by [x]) 7. Better sound and camera/video support. 8. Font Control in scripting tiles 9. Tile to "grab" a section of the screen (from x,y to x', y'). What I am thinking of here is I like to encourage kids to a) make appropriate comparisons, so seeing the results of multiple modeling runs side by side would be useful. Also for combinations/permutations such as given two/three/four/... color blocks how many different stacks can you make two/three/four/... high. This could probably be done by simply having them stack the blocks in a playfield and copy the playfield (scaled down) to a holder. Not sure about this one. User Interface Improvements: 1. Improved Visual Clues when placing items in scripts and Holders to see where they are going to be placed. Too many kids struggle with this and get frustrated (which I think is a big part of why folks say "Scratch is easier") ex: 1. scripting tiles don't go where they want 2. An item is placed int the wrong spot in a holder 3. They add an item to an expression instead of being able to change a value 2. Access to "Visual Help" at the scripting tile/menu item as opposed to in quick guides. I am thinking here of an animation of what the tiles/menu items actually do, with more than one example so kids get the idea their are multiple ways to use them not just one way. Similar to the ideas/work of a fellow (whose name I can't remember :( but he did some smalltalk work similar to PA Dreyfus' project Kids In Clouds he wrote a paper on cartoon communication or something like that, I am sure you folks will know who I am talking about when you look at Kids in Clouds (Bert showed me his work at Squeakfest), if you can get me his name I would appreciate it I want to re-read some of his papers and I can't find them :( Scratch does this with option click on a tile to get a menu which includes help. But instead of a static help message, animated help with multiple examples and try this or what would happen if you tried ... or how could you use this to ... (ie: prompts to get the kids to think) 3. Scrollable Viewer if items extend beyond viewable screen space. 4. Simpler entry of expressions in scripting tiles (parentheses is the biggest pain) 5. Scrolling of Script Editors when the script is wider or taller than its holder (ie: playfield or world) 6. In Holders, visualy move items out of the way to see where I am going to insert an item. 7. Kid Friendly Error messages 8. Be able to toggle between full screen and partial screen painting and allow the canvas to be moved 9. Improved Paint tools 10. Ability to flip horizontal/veritcal everything, not just graphics Thanks, Stephen
_______________________________________________
squeakland mailing list squeakland@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
On Monday 23 Aug 2010 5:27:30 pm Alan Kay wrote:
Please do follow through with your plan of asking for 3 (or 20) things -- thoughtful comments like yours are like gold for us.
While we are on the wishlist collection mode, here is mine based on observations of how kids use Etoys :
* Make Color Picker a persistent widget like Trash or Catalog and put current color rectangle at cursor point. The widget will work in two modes - dropper and picker. In dropper mode, colors can be dragged from this palette and dropped onto morphs to change their color. Hand changes to a dropper icon when it holds a color. In color tracking mode, the current color floats over color under Hand on mouseDown.
* add GrabFlood tool (like grab image and lasso) to Supplies.
* add Silhouette tool to extract a silhoutte sketch out of a morph.
* allow a morph to be used a stencil. i.e. use it to "cut" a sketch out of a playfield. E.g. pressing a translucent rectangle in world to extract a sketch is more intuitive and flexible than grab image.
* Allow morphs to be embedded, stamped or stencil into other morphs by pressing and holding it over a base morph. The candidates for embedding should be determined from cursor point and not the held morph's reference point.
* Reveal Pen (e.g. ellipse with color) in a morph's halo. Gray it out if pen is up. Allow pen size and color to be changed directly like reference point.
* drop morphic menu items on viewer to automatically create a tile for it.
* dropping a player's script onto the viewer of another player to make a copy for that player.
* add sensors like gps, fan, battery level, temperature, camera, mic as variables in World.
Subbu
etoys-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org
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Alan Kay -
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Steve Thomas