HI Bob --

The Etoys are at their best for 5th graders. Our experience with 8th graders is that they can do most of the existing 5th grade centric curriculum in 6 weeks or so. And then they need a superset of either or both of curriculum and what the language can do. We've been working on the supersets for a while (and are a little behind our plans as to when they will be supported.)

But now I'm curious as to the development model you'd like to use. If it is ABABABABA then the kids can simply email the existing project back and forth or store it on the web (there are even swikis (e.g. from GaTech) that allow projects to be uploaded and downloaded).

If you are talking about kids independently working on the "same" project at the "same time", then they are either working on different objects -- in which case you would like to merge the changes -- or they might be modifying the same objects (more likely some of the time) -- in which case forking is really going on and the merge is not trivial.

I'd like to hear how you think this would work with your kids.

In the latter case of forking it is probably more useful for them to be sharing the very same single project so the changes are going in directly and the clashes will be quick and usually obvious. The "Nebraska" sharing mechanism (through the badges) *can* do this since it is essentially a Timbuktu like client-server on the same project on one of the machines. It might be interesting to try some experiments to see if this works.

"In the future" this will be solved using the undermechanisms of the Croquet system ( http://opencroquet.org )operating through the superset.

Cheers,

Alan

At 06:39 AM 12/14/2005, Bob Irving wrote:
This is what I love about the open source community!  I get a response from Alan Kay, the creator of Squeak!  Awesome.
 
Actually, though, my two students are using eToys, not the Squeak language.  They are 8th graders.  However, they seem to be bumping up against the limits of the eToys environment and yesterday I showed them the code "underneath the hood" to try to solve a problem.  We'll see if they are ready to move on to coding.
 
But I guess that there really isn't a way in eToys to do shared development and versioning.  It's not crucial: a nice-to-have rather than a must-have.
 
Thanks again!

 
 
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