Rita, that is very interesting as I was wondering about whether the "show code textually" was actually used by kids/students. I do wish that EToys was in some ways more accessible as I always feel that I am about to break everything, I have lost count of the number of times I have quit squeak without saving to be able to recover the original version of a project I was working on, and I am sure that there is an easier way of doing this but I could not find it.
It would be great if there was more documentation out there and there where more resources for teaching smalltalk, I found it sad when I heard on FLOSS Weakly 66 that programs where being written for the OLPC in HTML / Javascript because smalltalk was seen as being difficult.
2009/7/1 Rita Freudenberg rita@isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de:
Ryan Simmons wrote:
I some ways I agree with Ramon, that Squeak should become more aimed at developers.
I do however feel that education is very important I was especially impressed by Dr. Geo II. I feel that EToys, Dr. Geo etc should become applications that can be loaded in very much like Seaside can be loaded into a variety of smalltalks.
I will probably not be too popular for saying the following, but I fail to see how EToys helps to teach children the use of smalltalk, (and hence why I am confused that so many feel that it should be part of Squeak) if it is there to help teach programming concepts to children then I would also have to say that Scratch seems to be a much better tool for doing this.
When I'm building Etoys scripts with teachers and I show them the option in a scriptor "show code textually" they are surprised and interested. Because for kids/students, who are eager to learn more that's a way to show them what is "under the hood". You can even go all the way to the class browser and look for your etoys objects and scripts. That's not really easy at the moment, but I think that is something worth to work on! We have BotsInc, too, as a learning tool of how to use the squeak environment. What we need are ideas about how to better integrate these parts. And of course we need documentation, so that all the wonderful features of Squeak are accessible.
Rita
2009/7/1 Stéphane Rollandin lecteur@zogotounga.net:
+10
Seriously, stop talking about kids, who cares, I'll be retired by the time they're useful. Programming languages are tools that are primarily used by and useful for adults, they should be aimed at adults.
Man, do you realize what you wrote here is incredibly out of place ? This is Squeak-dev here, Squeak has been involved with education and children since its beginnings, we have EToys, Scratch, OLPC. My own children use it. If you want a cultural revolution, ok, but first gather your troops, and let us count them.
There's definitely a need to have everybody explicit their view of what it Squeak, me repeat again... surprises could be ahead.
Stef
-- Rita Freudenberg FIN-ISG Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/isg/rita.html