These are the central important questions (thanks for stating them so clearly) and we need to solve them. Needless to say, for some time we have been worried about this and thinking about what is best to do here. Suggestions are most welcome!

What scenario would you suggest?

Cheers,

Alan

At 10:03 AM 8/24/2007, carla gomez monroy wrote:

eToys team,

eToys, I love it. It is so powerful. However, for some people it can be quite intimidating to get a blank screen when they click on "Make A New Project."

The Demo is nice but it for example doesn't say "click on the right (circle) button to get the icons for manipulating the object" The Tutorial and the Gallery of Projects, children see them as games not as things they can make or modify.

The use of eToys may not seem that intuitive from the perspective of teachers or students who have just received an XO laptop and it is the first laptop or even computer they have ever touched.

I have given to the teachers in printed form

• powerful ideas in the classroom
• eToys quick guide
• eToys manual

and the three together are ~200 pages long.

And some won't try it by themselves until someone sits with them and goes through it. Maybe more so if they are rural primary teachers. Some might be inclined to just learn the basics and stay there.

How can we go about it so they feel curious about trying it, and keep on learning on their own or with their peers or their students? I'm thinking on how can we do it, that it doesn't need a full time person introducing it, or if so, how can it be in a short short time.

Best regards,

Carla _______________________________________________ Etoys mailing list Etoys@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/etoys

On 8/25/07, carla gomez monroy carla@laptop.org wrote:

However, for some people it can be quite intimidating to get a blank screen

when they click on "Make A New Project."

I'm wondering why the first step is always to make a painting - and then when you keep the painting you have an object and can then do more powerful things at that point

A naive user might think it is just a paint program. Also some people don't like painting or are not good at it, eg. me. Also it's hard to paint well with a mouse.

Why not have prepackaged sprites which can be loaded immediately (as well as the painting option)? Then the user is one step closer to the more powerful stuff. It also sends a message that it is not just a paint program - there has to be more to it than just loading a sprite

LogoWriter, MicroWorlds and GameMaker all have prepackaged sprites

I have given to the teachers in printed form

• powerful ideas in the classroom

I think *all* of the book, Powerful ideas in the classroom, should be available on the web. The car tutorial on squeakland is great but it's not enough. There are some good pdfs on squeakland too but the site is poorly organised and it took me ages to find them. I wrote a blog about the frustrating but eventually successful search for etoy resources here: http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/04/frustrating-but-eventually-successful....

It would be good to have a comprehensive help manual in one place. Pop up help is good but sometimes more detail is needed. Such a manual would probably be used more by teachers than by students but that is still useful.

Adam Hyde from FLOSSmanuals.net has offered FLOSSmanual's services (and manpower) for making documentation for OLPC software - wants to do highly-graphical, minimally-verbal (and therefore easy to internationalize) manuals for XO stuff. I suggested Etoys as a good first start, largely because of this and similar mailing list threads; there's a lot of information out there but no starter walkthrough to get people comfortable playing with everything on their own.

Is anyone on this list interested in putting their notes & materials into such a "quickstart manual"? Any suggestions for people to ping?

-Mel

On 8/27/07, Paulo Drummond ptdrumm@terra.com.br wrote:

On Aug 26, 2007, at 10:07 PM, Bill Kerr wrote:

On 8/25/07, carla gomez monroy carla@laptop.org wrote:

However, for some people it can be quite intimidating to get a blank

...

screen when they click on "Make A New Project."

I'm wondering why the first step is always to make a painting - and then when you keep the painting you have an object and can then do more powerful things at that point.

Imho, the first step is to understand a little of this environment and what was the idea behind Etoys. Depending on the age/grade, the deepness varies. However, the teacher has a crucial role here: to understand it first. The book "Powerful Ideas in the Classroom" is of enormous value.

The next expected step for a child (in this environment) is to create an object. Children usually like to pictorially represent their world. They need to express it as they need to situate themselves in the surrounding society. Contextualize.

They can also use other predefined objects like ellipses/circles, rectangles/squares etc to complement their painting, or give a more "realistic" display of their object-symbols. Conversely, they may use the paint palete to "personalize" some geometrical primitives they've place in their world.

It has been demonstrated (http://www.squeakcmi.org) that kids at initial grades can use Etoys as a starting point to understand it and to express their ideas, paving the way to more advanced representations using the very same environment.

A naive user might think it is just a paint program. Also some people don't like painting or are not good at it, eg. me. Also it's hard to paint well with a mouse.

Children can use Etoys as a mapping tool. Actually they don't give a penny about accuracy, just because they don't need to. Adults generally do, even not knowing a bit of its usefulness.

Why not have prepackaged sprites which can be loaded immediately (as well as the painting option)? Then the user is one step closer to the more powerful stuff. It also sends a message that it is not just a paint program

• there has to be more to it than just loading a sprite

LogoWriter, MicroWorlds and GameMaker all have prepackaged sprites

Then Squeak Etoys would be another thing. When not-so-young kids need a more sophisticated expression-driven, more in the realm of productivity authoring tools — with many of the programmatic aspects of Etoys, they may go to another great tool: Scratch.

I have given to the teachers in printed form

...

• powerful ideas in the classroom

I think *all* of the book, Powerful ideas in the classroom, should be available on the web. The car tutorial on squeakland is great but it's not enough. There are some good pdfs on squeakland too but the site is poorly organised

Afaik, a new squeakland website is in the works.

and it took me ages to find them. I wrote a blog about the frustrating but eventually successful search for etoy resources here:

http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/04/frustrating-but-eventually-successful....

It would be good to have a comprehensive help manual in one place. Pop up help is good but sometimes more detail is needed. Such a manual would probably be used more by teachers than by students but that is still useful.

I could not agree more. Etoys documentation is really very scarce and sparse. With the help of the Squeakland community worldwide, these things are starting to show up here and there. It has been posted in laptop.org's [Community-news] that the Etoys dev team has started a discussion about this issue.

— paulo

-- Bill Kerr http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/

---

Etoys mailing list Etoys@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/etoys

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Etoys mailing list Etoys@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/etoys

Hi all,

Bill Kerr escribió:

[...]

I think *all* of the book, Powerful ideas in the classroom, should be available on the web. The car tutorial on squeakland is great but it's not enough. There are some good pdfs on squeakland too but the site is poorly organised and it took me ages to find them. I wrote a blog about the frustrating but eventually successful search for etoy resources here: http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/04/frustrating-but-eventually-successful....

It would be good to have a comprehensive help manual in one place. Pop up help is good but sometimes more detail is needed. Such a manual would probably be used more by teachers than by students but that is still useful.

Comprehensive Open Content documentation is a big lack for Squeak (may be for a lot of other programs also). It's more an editors choise, after all most of the authors want to be read, but would be nice if, for example, as a part of the Summer of Content we could get the liberation of some of the excellent books for Squeak like Powerfull Ideas for the Classroom of the Bot Inc book. I don't know if the sponsor entities behind the project can put money on that and help to convince the editors.

Cheers,

Offray

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Hi all and Bill,

Thanks for your elaborations and thoughts. The talk about Universals/Non-universals is aldo one of the most interesting ones I had the opportunity to read. Here are some comments.

Bill Kerr wrote:

[...]

I sort of agree with this approach but am also torn. Game Maker is unashamedly populist, the focus is absolutely clear from its name. So kids end up programming on an inferior platform - no morphic, no late binding, Windows only, proprietary code. It would be nice if more young people spontaneously picked up on etoys / squeak, that it could generate that sort of appeal. The way kids view school these days to promote something as "educational" is almost the kiss of death!!

Your words reminds me about a chapter of The Simpsons, where Bart was destroying cities in a video game, and the game said of which state the city was the capital. After a while and in despite of the violence, Bart realized that it was and "educative game", so he drop it. Playing is a powerful way to learn and games and toys (or using/building them as in the approach of GameMaker or Squeak, respectively) are engaging for most of the students. We "intuitively" know if the game/toy is fine, so we can use the link between intuition and the things that we want to teach in a emotional and cognitive sense. But is also true that games, science and art exist for their own sake and there is and intrinsic pleasure and beauty in "making/playing" them. So my main question is how can use The Link to get people becoming part of a community of practice (the one which makes Science, Art or even games) in a way that people develop the aesthetics and epistemologies of their communities in the process of belonging and participate in them.This other link between community and the individual is important to me because at some point, when passion is legitimate it exceed the individual and reach the culture (the other way is also true).

[...]

I would see Etoys / Squeak as more powerful than either Scratch or Game Maker. I wouldn't see young students moving over from Etoys to Scratch as a step upwards, it seems more like a step backwards to me.

I like the low entry, high ceiling approach. You don't need the high ceiling for all students but in any group a small proportion of hackers emerges, say 5%, which does need the high ceiling. One aim ought to be to encourage that advanced group, one thing they do is drag the general level upwards

For the students I teach (secondary) the quality of their sprites is very important. I have seen them abandon their game making projects simply because they couldn't find the sprites they wanted on the web.

I was using Scratch as a beginning of the programming part this semester instead of Etoys in my course of Introduction to Informatics (for first semester undergraduate students) and because of the clean and explicit interface I can use with my students even with the particular situation of being outside of the country for two weeks in the very start of the classes. They catched the interface quickly and get this first hand experience with interactive programming and all of them liked it. But now we're going to move to Bots Inc and trying to "go down" to Smalltalk at least in an introductory fashion, the one allowed by Bots Inc, because I try to emphasize that informatics is not programming or computers and so we need to cover other subjects; instead programming is a way to modeling and this is a way to interpret, deconstruct and understand the world. The key is again how to go from a "production" environment to a "education" environment and from classroom to the world so, education is not that particular thing that happen "inside" schools/universities and life and culture is everything else "outside".

[...]

What I'm saying is that it would be good to have multiple pathways into etoys, not always starting with a painting, which is a v strong default at the moment. This would probably mean the ability from the start to select a variety of morphs from a supplies or widgets tab, which is a feature of eg. my squeak 3.8 full image but not a feature of the OLPC/etoys image. You only get the paint option. I can't find the world menu to access morphs in that way at all in the etoys image so I'm wondering about the design decisions that have been made in this case and the rationale behind them.

I think what you and alan will say is that the target group for the OLPC is ages 6 to 12, one of the core_principles: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Core_principles

Fair enough but I think for this group my comments still do have some relevance, so I'll send to the list as well

And my interpretation of what you say about multiple pahtways to etoys is that we need to make Squeak a "place of continuity" (sometimes the Squeak multiverse seems so fractured) and this is not because of the sake of Squeak of programming itself, is because powerful ideas are connected ones, these that let us made translations (in the sense of Jhon Maxwell, if I'm understanding him well). (Re/)Deconstruction of really to bring new understanding or aesthetic experience (or both) would be an important objective of powerful media. One of the first translations and bridges that we need to make is from popular culture (and its use of technology) to Science/Art and even other ways of understanding. If we don't make that bridge, we have a lost battle for the souls and minds of the young people against MTV, Xbox, Nintendo, Messenger/gtalk, MySpace/Facebook etc. Deconstruction is a guide in that bridge and is not only about "having the source code", is about making the path an elucidative one, a path that changes the user, so the user can change the path.

Cheers,

Offray

You might want to know that the book "Powerfull ideas in the classroom" has been translated into spanish by the small-land/Linex people: http://swiki.agro.uba.ar/small_land/193 and they also provide other spanish documentation about squeak/etoys at http://swiki.agro.uba.ar/small_land/27