squeakland December 2005

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23 participants
36 discussions

Re: [Squeakland] Squeak & Mobile Phones
by Darius Clarke 08 Dec '05

08 Dec '05

Perhaps using a phone to remote control a web site powered by Squeak, IM messaging to live running Squeak images, touch tone control, or inserting phone voice mail messages into a Squeak Project files might be useful adjuncts to normal Squeaking. But, I agree with Alan, the controls are too limited for expressing, controlling, and manipulating complex concepts. (The $100 notebook would do better since it can mimic a phone.) Cell phones might also be used in experiments in linguistics (semantics, syntax), UI design, and cognition by having one person dictate a "program" to achieve a goal and someone at a PC on the other phone trying to create what they hear (and unable to see the speaker's gestures). The first person could see the results of what the second person creates in this controlled feedback loop. This could be varied to a) a limited vocabulary, b) adjusting the vocabulary as they progress, c) add vocabularies from different disciplines, d) restrict or require the use of metaphors and narrative techniques, and e) compare vocabularies created by different teams. Also, take note how much is assumed, how much has to be remembered by both communicators, cultural differences of vocabulary meaning and use, varying time and vocabulary efficiencies (and misunderstandings), emotional reactions (and frustrations), and the role of abstractions and mental models. Another cell phone experiment might include having a student roam an unfamiliar area and verbally communication with a Squeak model of the area. In addition, cell phones tend to have very minimal resources, proprietary programs and API's, and very differing configurations making general adoption difficult. Cheers, Darius

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Sibling use?
by Bob Irving 07 Dec '05

07 Dec '05

I need some help with understanding siblings. I thought it was a way to make copies (or instances) of an object, which would then be controllable with the same script that controls the original object. Am I wrong here? The situation is this * I have a student who is make a game where the player controls a rocket trying to avoid asteroids. He wants to control all the asteroids' movement with one script. Is there another way to do this, or is it better to go the sibling route? Thanks in advance, Bob Irving Middle School Technology Facilitator Lancaster Country Day School Lancaster, PA Blog: www.e-lcds.org/wordpress/ "It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory." W. Edward Deming

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Squeak & Mobile Phones
by Ikem Nzeribe 07 Dec '05

07 Dec '05

Hi... I was just wondering, has anybody ported Squeak to mobile phones - some kind of SqueakPlayer or something? Kids are absolutely crazy for mobile phones, and Squeak is such a wonderful development environment for kids, it makes such sense to turn kids onto it by porting it to mobile devices. Just a thought from a newbie. Ikem.

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workshop feedback
by Randy Heiland 07 Dec '05

07 Dec '05

Just had another fun Squeak workshop for a troop of 6th grade girls at the Girl Scout computer lab last night. Thought I'd provide a bit of feedback for the dev team... 1) as I said, it was a lot of fun once again - thanks for Squeak/eToys! 2) the most common pitfall they had was using/placing the Test block in a script. The usual situation was that they didn't wait for a "green drop-it-here" slot to open before dropping and would just butt it up against the bottom of the script. Then, when I told them that it wasn't really inside the script, they would grab it - usually at the bottom-right corner, and try to put it in the script again. But of course the green drop-it-here slot is triggered by the mouse cursor, which means they would have to drag the Test block much higher than is intuitive. After later playing around with this very situation a bit more, I wonder if it would be better to have a Test block *only* be pickable/draggable from its upper-left corner and have some little colored glyph in that corner to indicate so. Since the Test block is sort of a different beast than the other tiles in a Viewer, it might be OK to have a different UI to dragging it? Just a thought. 3) the other problem encountered more than once was when someone would start out by drawing a very large sketch, keep it, scale it down, drag it over near the (right or bottom) edge of the world, repaint it -- then, oops, it's off the screen - and if I go ahead and repaint/keep it, it comes back cropped. 4) once again I had a parent asking "if I download Squeak on our home computer, will it infect it with viruses or allow annoying popups, etc" - as they had happen with other "educational software". I share this only in order to ask whether you think it's worth putting some sort of assurance statement on the Squeakland site? --Randy

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The Weekly Squeak No.14: November 20th - November 26th
by Giovanni Corriga 07 Dec '05

07 Dec '05

Dear squeakers, Hello, and welcome back to the The Weekly Squeak, a weekly report on what's going on in the world of Squeak. It seems like this past week has been a little slow on the news side. Could it be that the Squeak developer are working at making Squeak an even better system? Anyway, we are happy to provide you with a good mix of news from the various Squeak-related mailing lists. In this issue you'll find: 1. Pier 1.0.0 alpha: now with access control 2. A German Squeakland success story 3. SoapCore 0.8 on SqueakMap 4. A report on the Bern Smalltalk Gathering 5. @squeak-mentors.org 6. MCConfigurations quick howto 7. Squeakland and particle systems 8. SQLite3 FFI wrapper for Mac OS X 9. Squeak on an electronic paper display 10. Packaging media with Monticello 11. More work on the bootstrapped kernel image 12. Upcoming Squeak Chats You'll find the complete report at http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5740 . The past issues archive can be found at http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5751 . The Weekly Squeak has an RSS feed: http://people.squeakfoundation.org/person/gcorriga/rss.xml .

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rolling square challenge
by Randy Heiland 07 Dec '05

07 Dec '05

I have a square sketch that rolls: Square turn by amt1 Square's x increase by amt2 I'd like to have another sketch - say, a tiny circle, that remains fixed at a corner of the rolling square and traces out a pen path. Is there an elegant Squeak solution for doing this that I'm missing? --Randy

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Re: [Squeakland] rolling square challenge
by Nicholas Bennett 07 Dec '05

07 Dec '05

randy, You can 'embed' the circle into the square, its one of the halo menu choices. Once the circle is embedded any movement scripts executed on the circle are in the squares coordinate system - so you can build Spiro graph style things. If you move the circle outside of the 'draw area' of the square you can no longer 'pick' it with the mouse. I think this makes it hard to take full advantage of the embed capability. regards, nicholas >From: "Randy Heiland" <heiland(a)indiana.edu> >To: "'squeakland.org mailing list'" <squeakland(a)squeakland.org> >Subject: [Squeakland] rolling square challenge >Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 15:06:28 -0500 > >I have a square sketch that rolls: > Square turn by amt1 > Square's x increase by amt2 > >I'd like to have another sketch - say, a tiny circle, that remains fixed at >a corner of the rolling square and traces out a pen path. Is there an >elegant Squeak solution for doing this that I'm missing? > >--Randy > >_______________________________________________ >Squeakland mailing list >Squeakland(a)squeakland.org >http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland

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sketch's rotation center
by Randy Heiland 07 Dec '05

07 Dec '05

Maybe I just haven't found it yet, but is there a tile(s) for setting a sketch's rotation center (x,y), i.e. the little cross-hair about which rotation occurs? Thanks, Randy

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Re: [Squeakland] squeak newbie hear - asking newbie question
by Yael Yankelev 06 Dec '05

06 Dec '05

Hi Kim, I haven't purchased the book yet. Though I did purchase the documentary film which was really informative and fun. I'm really surprised that there isn't more free documentation available. I do work for the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning at the Stern School of Business at NYU, but my interest in Squeak is actually for my Masters work at the NYU Steinhardt School of Ed. in the Educational Communications and Technologies program. Right now I am just doing some exploratory work with Squeak with the potential of incorporating it into my Masters Thesis. I should be thanking you! Your and the rest of the Squeak team's work is an inspiration. Best, Yael Kim Rose wrote: > Hello, Yael - > Have you gotten a copy of "Powerful Ideas in the Classroom"? > http://www.squeakland.org/sqmedia/books/order.html > If not, I think you'd find it helpful. > Are you at NYU? Stern school? I am curious about your use > of/interest in Etoys...??? > thanks for your support! > Kim > > >> Hi, >> >> I've managed to familiarize myself with the basics EToys functionality >> but I can't for the life me figure out how to import say a jpg, or gif >> into a Squeak project.. I've even looked through other projects that >> have imported images, and still can't figure out how they got in there. >> >> Can someone give me a few hints on how to do this? Is there a favorite >> how-to doc that everyone uses somewhere? I've done all the tutorials >> and quickstart on SqueakLand, is there anything out there that will take >> me further? >> >> Yael >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Squeakland mailing list >> Squeakland(a)squeakland.org >> http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland > > -- Yael Yankelev Assistant Director, Educational Technology Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning NYU Stern School of Business 212-998-0996 yyankele(a)stern.nyu.edu <mailto:ccappiel@stern.nyu.edu> http://www.stern.nyu.edu/Faculty/citl

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feature request: color selection
by Randy Heiland 05 Dec '05

05 Dec '05

It would be nice if, when I brought up the color selection palette, it had the selector circle on the currently-selected color. That way I could move it slightly to select a slightly darker/lighter color. Just a thought, Randy

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squeakland December 2005