squeakland April 2007

squeakland@lists.squeakfoundation.org

13 participants
15 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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When to define a local variable
by Young-Jin Lee 20 May '07

20 May '07

Hi, I am a newbie trying to learn Squeak. The squeak book and tutorials says that I need to define a local variable using a pipe like below: | someMuppet | someMuppet := Muppet new. someMuppet name: 'Elmo'. someMuppet greet. But when I tried the same code without defining a local variable shown below, I got the expected results, which makes me wonder when I should define a local variable. anotherMuppet := Muppet new. anotherMuppet name: 'Gookie Monster'. anotherMuppet greet. My guess is that I need not define a local variable if my code is being executed within a Workspace because all variables such as anotherMuppet will have "Workspace" scope. Can anyone please explain in more detail about variable scopes? Thanks in advance. Young-Jin Lee

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Help for getting BotsInc on ODLP
by stéphane ducasse 01 May '07

01 May '07

Hi all I was discussing with Bert about getting botsinc running on ODLP. The environment is really small it is 17 classes. And this would be great to have an environment to teach Smalltalk on it. Apparently Bert told me that Alan would be interested and that I should send an email to this mailing- list. So this is what I'm doing. Now I need help. I have a bug when I put a self halt in the method that is executed. Ned told me that it could be easily fixed but right now I have no time and I got already burnt in the pas with concurrency and morphic. So I would like to know if somebody is interested in helping me. square "self square" self north. self go: 200. self halt. self east. self go: 200. Does not stop the bot and its animation. (I have an older version not based on the rewrite that Ned did for me but based on morphic wrapper that is working correctly but I would prefer to use the last one since I developed further and it is in sync with the book). I was working on a better history of commands. Now there is also a problem of how to save script. I proposed to save categories but may be we need something better than that. I'm working on releasing extra chapters (with Lsystem and other). I'm working also on releasing another micro world with a robot (looking like Karel with really fun exercises). These extras chapters will be freely available. But all that takes time. On a 3.8 image On SqueakMap load shout.4 (this is not necessary and we can remove it after, it just gives a better feedback on errors). MCHttpRepository location: 'http://www.squeaksource.com/BotIncPica' user: '' password: '' BotIncPica-Ned-sd.44.mcz Under help -> reinstall full menu Stef

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¿Which tool use to code collaboratively?
by Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas 30 Apr '07

30 Apr '07

Hi all, Me and my students are working on a collective project using Bots Inc and is the time to integrate the parts. I would like to know which is the better tool for that. I have been searching and there are different options: changesets and Monticello (may be more). Monticello seems more graphical and may be more easy. I have installed it opening a Bot workspace (its similar to a classical workspace) and typing: SMSqueakMap bootStrap. after that I get the SquekMap and on it I search and install Monticello but after that I don't know how open it (Bots Inc graphical environment is different from the standard one, so World->open->Monticello Browser is not available. * ¿There is a way to open Monticello browser with a command from a workspace? *¿There are various Monticello packages listed in Squeak map (Monticello 2, MonticelloCVS, MonticelloMultiRep, etc). Which one should we use? Thanks a lot, Offray

1 1

Call for Presenters - SqueakFest '07
by Kim Rose 25 Apr '07

25 Apr '07

Greetings! The official SqueakFest '07 website is now live and ready for you to propose a presentation, workshop or panel. This year's dates are August 1, 2 and 3. Thanks to our friends at Columbia College for designing, hosting and maintaing the site. http://imamp.colum.edu/eceim/squeakfest07/index.php We'll be adding more information as it becomes available, but for now, the important thing is to get your input as presenters so we can begin to design the program for our three days together. Please complete and submit the online form no later than May 25, 2007. Please share this email/url with colleagues, friends, associates, etc. anyone you think would be interested in presenting or attending this year's SqueakFest gathering in Chicago, IL. We hope to see you there! cheers, Kim

1 0

Squeak at Extremadura
by Kim Rose 25 Apr '07

25 Apr '07

Hello, Please see below to learn about some recent Squeak activities in Extremadura, Spain. -- Kim > >X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new-20030616-p10 (Debian) at juntaextremadura.net > >Hello; > >I wish to notify about recent Squeak activities at Extremadura (Spain): ><http://squeak.educarex.es/Squeakpolis/106>http://squeak.educarex.es/Squeakpolis/106 >and internal links from this page. > >Thanks a lot. > > >Antonio Moreno Pérez >Dirección General de Política Educativa >Consejería de Educación >Junta de Extremadura >España

1 0

Interactive educative application with Squeak
by Hilaire Fernandes 24 Apr '07

24 Apr '07

Hello, I am developing an interactive educative application with Squeak. I have set up a few videos to give some ideas about what it is: http://people.ofset.org/hilaire/ifichier/video/ If you are interested, you can contact me in private. Hilaire

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squeakland plugin fails
by subbukk 19 Apr '07

19 Apr '07

Hi, The test page for squeakland plugins failed on me with an error message in Deutsche. http://www.squeakland.org/plug/launch.html refers to "/projects/test.001.pr" which doesn't exist. This causes plugin tests to fail on all browsers. There are two ways to fix this problem. 1. Change "test.001.pr" to to "EToy-Template.001.pr" in launch.html, or 2. cp EToy-Template.001.pr to test.001.pr on the server. The SqueakPlugin.image defaults to Deutsche. Shouldn't this be in English? Whom should I contact to get this fixed? TIA .. Subbu

1 0

Exporting a thread/Navigator content
by Hilaire Fernandes 19 Apr '07

19 Apr '07

It is asked to me to provide a report about a speech on Squeak in education. Therefore I need to export the various projects populating the thread/navigator I used for the speech. Of course I could export one by one the project to PNG image. Are there any functions to do it in one shot for all the project related to the thread? Thanks a lot Hilaire

1 0

Squeak as Presentation vehicle.
by Brad Fuller 17 Apr '07

17 Apr '07

I have a friend who I'd like to show how Squeak can be an effective presentation tool. He's not a programmer, he's a teacher. The whole Squeak desktop to him is a bit scary, so I'd like to give him some pointers on how Squeak can do things that presentation software can not (is powerpoint the only one left standing, now?) There are all the tools in the Objects flap, the Paint flap, connectors, book morphs which can all be placed into Squeak Projects. That's great. Is the Thread Navigator the best way to navigate projects? (I saw an older presentation of Alan's and he had a screen full of projects that he could pick from. I didn't see that in the latest image) I see several people use book morphs but they can be cumbersome too. I think the biggest complaint is the paradigm of when you select an morph you actually pick it up and that's counter to what other software does - plus the halos. Guess that's just something to be learned. Another complaint is you can't just drop a .mov, .wmv or .mp4 in a project. You can drop mpeg, (but sometimes I have audio distortion which doesn't show up at all outside in various players.) Maybe Sophie work can migrate to the main image for .mov/.avi? That'd be nice. I guess an image could be constructed with a limited world menu restricted to "presentation" uses. Any other pointers that you can think of? I'd sure like for him start using squeak. -- brad fuller www.bradfuller.com +1 (408) 799-6124

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squeakland April 2007