Hello, fellow Squeakers,

It is my pleasure to announce that the October issue is finally ready to get out of the door. We should complete sending the CDs to our subscribers by Monday.

It took quite a while but this issue has the record number of active essays in it. Many of these are collected from teachers. Some are used as tutorials for students and some are genuine work of students using Squeak.

This issue will be a great tool to introduce Squeak to schools. Alan Kay's "Stronger Goals for Education" coupled with articles by 3 teachers who use Squeak actively in schools to teach Squeak to children, and an interview with Kim Rose state the case for Squeak in schools as never before. These are supported by Alan's older articles and a host of examples developed by students ranging from elementary to high school. Please contact me if you are interested in using this issue of Squeak News as a tool to introduce Squeak to schools.

I guess I don't need to reiterate that Squeak News is a monthly e-zine is a multi-media application which is 100% pure Squeak right from the opening screen. (See the main screen of the October issue at: http://www.squeaknews.com/current/sncoveroctsml.jpg ) It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and besides being a lot of fun, it includes dynamic content ranging from active essays and demos by Squeak gurus to masterpieces by school kids.

Here is the summary for the October issue:

Volume 1, Issue 4. 15 October 2001 Powerful Ideas in the Classroom

This month's emphasis is classroom and how Squeak is used by students and teachers in schools. We have examples created by students, articles written by teachers, and comments of students about their Squeak experience. There is a great interview we made with Kim Rose, executive director of the new home of Squeak Central: Viewpoints Research Institute, co-editor of the book "Squeak, Open Personal Computing and Media", and a long standing member of Squeak Central. We are very fortunate to be able to publish Alan Kay's "Stronger Goals for Education" which is a must read for anybody who has an interest in education. Alan was kind enough to permit us to publish many of his past articles and active essays as well and and we will publish them in this and the next issue. We also feature an article by Michael Rueger titled 'Plugging in Squeak' which is a great insight to Squeak's usage as a plug-in. Our beginners series continues with the article titled: "From objects to classes". It introduces classes and how they are used, and other Squeak basics such as blocks. As usual the October issue includes the monthly digest of the Squeak mailing list and Bijan Parsia's Squeak Tweaks column. This month Bijan revisits Quickie, a HTML editor for Squeak which is quickly reaching to the level of replacing other HTML editors! John McIntosh has again generously allowed us to use his OOPSLA reports and we took the privilege of combining them with Michael Rueger's pictures to have you relive the OOPSLA experience. From this month on we are ditching our monthly quiz in favor of Squeak's Most Wanted list which we will maintain on an SWiki.

You can reach the table of contents of the current issue by following the link:

http://www.squeaknews.com/current/index.html

and view the past issues of Squeak News by following:

http://www.squeaknews.com/archive/index.html

Happy Squeaking!

Tansel Ersavas Editor, Squeak News http://www.squeaknews.com