squeakland January 2007

squeakland@lists.squeakfoundation.org

13 participants
12 discussions

Lack of documentation frustrating
by Guyren Howe 27 May '07

27 May '07

Hi, I am volunteering at a local school, and will be doing squeakland once a week with some fifth graders. Squeakland (etoys?) seems ideal for these kids, except that I'm frustrated by the lack of documentation. I've spent ages looking through the website and searching online, and I can't really find the kinds of things I'm looking for. I went through some of the tutorials myself, and those will be great to get started, but I would like to give the kids fairly free reign, and be able to answer most of their questions. I tried to do some little projects myself, but I kept coming up with seemingly simple things I wanted to do, and not finding any obvious way to do them (or, as I say, any documentation suitable for answering the questions). For example: I wanted to make an etoy follow the mouse pointer around. I can't see any way of even obtaining a reference to a mouse object. I would also like to do loops and suchlike. Not obvious how to do that. I can see that if I can dive down into the smalltalk level, I could do it, but this seems like the kind of thing that's probably at the squeakland (etoy? What do I call the kids' environment?) level. But as I say, what I'm really looking for is not this particular fish, but how to fish for myself. I would buy a book, but the one pointed at from the website appears to just be a set of projects, rather than the kind of documentation I'm looking for. Squeak: Learn Programming by Controlling Robots looks like it might be sort of what I'm looking for, although I'm interested in a broader range of Squeakland projects than just the turtle graphics mentioned in the summary of the book. So: where is the documentation it seems ought to be there? Thanks.

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game controllers?
by Bob Irving 31 Jan '07

31 Jan '07

I saw a demonstration at Squeakfest last summer of someone using Squeak with some very simple, inexpensive game controllers. Unfortunately, I didn't write down the brand. Can anyone point me to a source for these? I would like to use them in my 6th grade class, where my students are writing games in Squeak. Thanks in advance, Bob Irving Middle School Technology Facilitator Lancaster Country Day School Lancaster, PA Blog: http://cougar.e-lcds.org/wordpress/ "In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the Learned find themselves equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." Eric Hoffer

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Tesch Squeak (call for help)
by Giuseppe Luigi Punzi 29 Jan '07

29 Jan '07

Hi all, I would like to help to the community, and, because there are people like me, with difficult learning Squeak/Smalltalk, I want to help them. I have ZyoForma, an e-learning platform and I will give it to offer Free Squeak Courses. The platform is based on moodle, and all (teachers, developers), can use it for his own courses to help learning Squeak or Object Oriented Concepts. The courses can have chats, forums, wikis, cuestionaries, and all the necessary content to make an online course. There are some conditions: - The course must be free (as speech, and as a beer). Creative Commons license or similar. - The courses must be in English. Other languages are supported but only under translating others. This will help to get all the possible courses on a main language like English. If you want, for example, publish a course about morphic, you need it on English and then, other language you want to publish. You can translate courses from english to your language if you want. I think this, can help existing wikis and webs to be more easy to learn Squeak and related. IMHO something like this is necessary, because for some people, is very difficult learn Squeak and his concepts browsing only the image, Probably it's the best way, but more people disturbs spending time without results. First, is necessary have a minimal concepts, then, you will be preapared to browse the image and other things. If you are familiarized with e-learning platforms, ZyoForma accept SCORM[1] files. Remember, all Squeak Content will be totally free. If you want to publish a course contact to get information with: teachsqueak(a)zyoconsulting.com Questions, critics and insults are welcome. ZyoForma: http://www.zyoconsulting.com/formacion [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORM -- Giuseppe Luigi Punzi - Consultor :: ZYO Consulting :: email: glpunzi(a)zyoconsulting.com tlfno: +34 675 145 912 web: http://www.zyoconsulting.com

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Did the www.squeakland.org break down?
by Xinyu Liu 23 Jan '07

23 Jan '07

Hi, I can't access the website now. Is there any body can connect it? Since the Optical fiber cables got broken due to the earthquake in TaiWan, I don't know if it is because that. Best regards. Yours, Liu.

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Re: [Squeakland] Tracing the Dynabook: A Dissertation
by John Maxwell 22 Jan '07

22 Jan '07

On Jan 19, 2007, at 12:00 PM, bert(a)freudenbergs.de wrote: > Sounds very interesting :) I of course searched the PDF for > "OLPC" (being one of the guys who puts Etoys onto the OLPC machine), > but it only has a brief mention. I'd be interested in your take on > that. I wrote the bulk of this thing before the OLPC project had gotten very far (which made it much easier to write! :-) and so there is just one footnote near the end. But I did address the OLPC issue in my thesis defense. While I'm eagerly watching the project, and have great optimism for it, I also think that it's a grand risk -- one of the biggest shots in the dark in recent history actually. My reason for this assessment has everything to do with the analysis of "computing cultures" that I talk about in the dissertation. There, I look at Squeak in the light of the incredible weight of accumulted Unix and Microsoft culture, which is shot through just about everything we do on the Internet these days. With such a culture (Eric Raymond's Art of Unix Programmming is a good ethnography), we have (more or less) a shared worldview, vocabularly, set of virtues, and benchmarks for what is good and what isn't. In light of that, what Squeak is or isn't able to accomplish in the 'developed world' is in response to or contrast to that dominant culture. It's an uphill battle some of the time (as we all know), but it also provides people at least a background against which Squeak's vision of the world can be seen/compared/evaluated. But... take it to Africa or wherever, and give it to kids who've never even been exposed to Microsoft culture, let alone Unix, let alone PARC/ Smalltalk/etc., and who knows how they will make sense of any of it. Maybe the lack of cultural baggage is a good thing, because there's less unlearning of the Unix way needed; EToys can be taken at "face value". Or maybe it makes it even more alien and remote and incomprehensible. In sum, I guess my "take on it" is that to focus on the technological achievements of OLPC (as the blogs are so fond of doing) vastly underestimates the amount of cultural context required to make sense of those achievements. We can take that context mostly for granted. Without the cultural background, however, it seems like a major shot in the dark. May it bring forth great and unseen things! - John Maxwell Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing Simon Fraser University jmax(a)sfu.ca

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Tracing the Dynabook: A Dissertation
by John Maxwell 20 Jan '07

20 Jan '07

Hi, everybody, For the past few years, I have been working on a historical study on the Dynabook vision as conceived in the early 1970s as well as how the idea and its various incarnations have played out in the intervening three-and-a-half decades. This has been part of my PhD work in education at the University of BC -- as such, I am working from an educational perspective, rather than a compsci one. As of November 2006 I finally finished the thing, and successfully defended it. I hereby unleash it on this community, in the hopes that it will provoke discussion on the Squeak-oriented mailing lists and beyond. Squeak-dev and Squeakland have been major resources to me all the while, and I'd like to thank everyone on these lists for providing such a rich ongoing commentary. The entire work is roughly 300 pages. This link is to a PDF just under 2 megabytes. At some point, if I have some time, I want to break this out into some more granular web pages, but I'm already late in releasing it, so here it is in its entirety. You can find it (along with a brief abstract and ToC) at: http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/Dynabook/dissertation I'm very interested in any comments you might have. - John Maxwell Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing Simon Fraser University jmax(a)sfu.ca

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Fwd: [Etoys] RE: Etoys Digest, Vol 5, Issue 12
by Kim Rose 20 Jan '07

20 Jan '07

> > >Question: > >I am wondering if anyone is working with etoys and accessibility. I'm a >school psychologist and some of the students I work with students have >disabilities, so this is in area that interests me. (I am also a >computer/tech student). > >Thanks! > >Lynn Marentette > >TechPsych >Interactive Multimedia Technology >

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Bots Inc, Robocup or Maze Squad. --Collective problem solving
by Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas 17 Jan '07

17 Jan '07

Hi all again, (Sorry for the cross posting, but I would like to have feedback from an advice from a newbie to programming from the perspective of an expert and also feedback from the perspective of an educator). As I said in another mail, this semester is starting and I'm planning the activities for the courses. One of them is for people related with Informatics Technologies and Education (Virtual Learning) as I wrote previously* and the other one if for freshmen students in University (most of them). For the second one group I'm thinking in some kind of collaborative game development, following the ideas of the previous semester with the Pingus/Lemmings Clone [1]. This time I want to go quickly on Etoys and use the Bots Inc. environment to write more code overpassing the restrictions intended for Etoys and younger children. [1] http://pingus.seul.org/welcome.html At the same time, I'm interested in study the collaborative solving of problems from a theoretical, computational and educative perspective. The idea is to make some kind of Squeak simulation on how collective problem solving its carried and see, in the classroom, if the model, in some way, its related with reality. From the previous semester work I have some ideas and hypothesis (thanks to the community on these list for educational reflexion, multiagent hints and specially to Scott Wallace for his "coordination" code for messages to stars). I would like to hear what do you think of this ideas for student projects: - To make some kind of robocup: There will be two competing teams that are trying to make a point putting a "ball" in the goal of the opponents. I'm not so interested in thing like perception (where is the ball), but I'm on coordination between Robots and how they solve, in a collective fashion, a problem. In that sense I have thought this other project also, - To make some kind of Maze Squad: It's some kind of pingus clone, but using Bots instead of Etoys. The robots are lock in a maze and you can see the maze from upside (a la Pacman). They're relatively dumb (if they found a wall they just bounce and go back, if they found a hole they just fall into it), but there are some special bots which can be selected to accomplish special task and help the others to get out of the maze. I'm not a programmer and with Squeak I'm relearning the experience of programming with my students. But I have no problem learning and exploring with them. We don't even need to solve the problem (programming the all game). I just want to build with my students a nice place to learn and to probe ideas and see "emergent behavior". My bet is on the second project, but may be you have more hints to share with my and my students. Cheers, Offray Pdt: * I'm still waiting for ideas or pointer on collective hypermedia authoring... :-)

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Collaborative hypermedia authoring and Squeak
by Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas 17 Jan '07

17 Jan '07

Hi all, It's the beginning of this semester and we, at university are starting some courses using Squeak. The first one will start this Friday and will have a month of duration. I was talking today with the people who will take the course and they expressed their interest specially in the creation of collaborative hypermedia with Squeak. The people who going to start the course is working with new technologies and education. They have some experience with learning management systems, like Black Board and social software like mediawiki. They have different background from engineering, graphical design, education and literature, and they want seriously to integrate Squeak in the virtual learning experience in the University. They have proposed three narrative "excuses" for the authoring: city maps (stories of places), travels (stories of journeys) or moving from home to home (stories of the things that we have in home). I know that Squeak spirit is also "to provide computer support for the creative spirit in everyone" and educative correlate make a lot of sense for the scenario that we have here. We can create hypermedia stories with bookmorph and some other morphs... but I'm thinking in the collaborative part of the experience, because I have never made collaborative authoring (or even programming in Squeak). Monticello is more for programmers; I have heard of Nebraska but never use it. I have browsing quickly the SqSqueak site and I see a category on the Object Catalog called "Collaborate", with things like Nebraska Server, Fridge, Badge and so on... even there is a server with boards that can be shared, but seems to need some kind of plugin to be used (I think that is the Squeak plugin for the browser)... will be really nice to know more exactly where to find more documentation on this category and collaboration in general in Squeak. Any advice, intended activities, pointer to documentation or ideas about for this course will be greatly appreciated. I think that it's a good opportunity to spread the Squeak word. I'm all ear and eyes and will be waiting for your advices on how to proceed. Cheers, Offray

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e-toys project
by malay kumar jana 16 Jan '07

16 Jan '07

Hi all, I am doing a e-toys (like aeroplane) project by using a morph and alice, but don't know where can I write the programming code and how to run. So could you please help me out from this problem. thankin you, regards, Malay ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss an email again! Yahoo! Toolbar alerts you the instant new Mail arrives. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/

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squeakland January 2007