See below, especially "... elective program classes have used Scratch to
deliver consulting and programming services for students at another
school." and "They made products that are real pieces of software, adapted
to the needs of real clients." :)
/Klaus
<quoted from ACM's TechNews>
"Coding (and Consulting) Kid-Style With Scratch"
T.H.E. Journal (12/07); Schaffhauser, Dian
MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten research group has developed
Scratch, a programming language designed to help kids learn mathematical
and computational concepts along with the process of design. A paper about
Scratch explains that the language can nurture skills in the areas of
information and communication, thinking and problem-solving, and
interpersonal and self-direction. The Scratch Web site freely offers the
program for download, examples, tutorials, and discussion forums, and
approximately 45,000 people have registered on the site thus far.
Programming via Scratch allows kids to blend together sounds, music,
graphics, and photos by dragging and dropping graphical command blocks
onto a Scripts work area. The program begins with a "sprite" character
that users can manipulate with command blocks, and starting and stopping
scripts involves the user clicking a green flag and a red stop sign
button, respectively. Students in Expo Elementary School teacher Karen
Randall's elective program classes have used Scratch to deliver consulting
and programming services for students at another school. Randall says the
language helped her team experience the process of design in a deeper and
more meaningful way. "They made products that are real pieces of software,
adapted to the needs of real clients," she says.
http://www.thejournal.com/articles/21743
</quote>
Happy New Year everyone,
Here is your news report for Dec 2007 and the year.
We had a big hit with Craig's pictures
http://news.squeak.org/2007/12/29/old-smalltalk-pics-from-parc-place/.
There was an amazing amount of interest: 29,614 hits! Thank you!
Craig helped us to beat our record and gave us our best day ever of 17,959
hits on Dec 30 (this was more then all the hits we received last month).
This was a very nice way to end the year.
Our second place post was http://news.squeak.org/2007/12/05/demand-olpc/
with: 1279 hits.
We had only 5 posts for the month.
Our search hits continue to be very strong on search keys that include
'OLPC'.
For the entire year of 2007 we had 179,745 hits. This was our first full
year (total of 16 months).
My impressions of the Weekly Squeak are that we are doing quite well. I've
noticed that there is a lot of talk about Smalltalk and Squeak and we are
receiving a number of links from other communities, blogs and web sites.
I'm sure most of the buzz has been generated by OLPC, Croquet and Seaside
but I would like to believe that we helped a little to raise the awareness
of other developers about the Squeak community and our continued support and
progress. We have a terrific community and I'm looking forward to the new
year of Squeak and Smalltalk.
We are proud to be a part of and support this community.
Thank you for supporting and reading the Weekly Squeak!
Ron Teitelbaum
and The Squeak News Team