Thank you for these comments, Jerry. I think you're bringing up important points.
I think it needs to be emphasized over and over again that Squeak is a research system. It is not a completed product, but a work in progress, and that causes ome of the frustrations teachers and other novices experience. Perhaps more could be done on the Squeakland site to make this clear.
Any programming environment provides challenges to non-expert users, and expert help is often needed. In my opinion many who promote computers as tools for learning say too little about the amount of support teachers and students need in order to get good results.
I'm sure most people on this list are excited about the promise of Squeak--many kinds of promises, really. It's astounding that Squeak has come so far, and that has a lot to do with people helping one another. Clearly, to get to the next stage, with ordinary users and ordinary teachers being able to use Squeak, much more needs to happen. The book by BJ Conn and Kim Rose is one step in that direction. But you are right to remind us not to confuse possibilities and promises with what is really doable now. While working to make some of these possibilites real, the Squeak community needs to try to stay clear about what's not real yet.
One other thought: Squeak is interesting not just because it makes certain things easy, but also because it is rich and complex. Rich, complex things (music, sports, math, art, etc.) are often difficult, often need very good helpers to be present, and sometimes need a huge amount of infrastructure. For instance, I am a musician today only because my school had a very good music teacher and a pile of instruments made by expert craftspeople and music manufactured by expert composers and publishers--and my parents got me lessons with still another expert, and I was able to play in youth orchestras with more expertise at hand. Even with all this help and encouragement, and even in such a supportive context, it took many years for me to get any good at all. Most of the helpers were able to provide very satisfying projects at every stage--even students who did not become professional musicians were able to have a good time participating.
Probably very few schools can offer the kind of infrastructure for computer learning that my school music program offered. Yet I think computers need the same kind of multilayered help and expertise, and a supportive context of enthusiasm and encouragement for the activity.
Maybe we need to lose the idea that doing interesting and valuable things on the computer can happen in isolation. One of the constantly-reinforced fantasies about computers is that they will make good things happen all on their own. It's an attractive notion, but it's a fantasy. If good things are to happen, people will be required.
John Steinmetz Squeak enthusiast bassoonist, composer
I am hoping this message will not make a persona non grata on the Squeakdev list, or make me go squeaking back to my little lurker hole in the wall ... but as a competent programmer in many languages (and around Squeak since *before* 2.7), I nonetheless feel the way R. O'Keefe does, *in spades*. And as for Rachel, cited in H. Hirzel's epigraph/email, she, like so many newbies to the squeaklist, appears to be long gone. I did begin, awhile ago, doing a kind of ethnography-of-disappearing-squeak-newbies, tracing their initial enthusiastic postings, the helpful replies (always, always including Ned Konz, bless you sir), the dreadfully high percentage of cases in which this initial enthusiasm would fade away ... but it was too depressing, and to what end?
I am not here to trash Squeak -- far from it! I have been around so long, on and off, because I truly do believe, on the one hand, that herein lies a potentially *great* environment for newbies to programming. As a teacher of teachers and an advocate of programming, this gets me very excited, as you can imagine. (And the record 2005 posts to squeak-dev in Feb 2003 was due in no small part to a sudden upsurge in the pedaogical consciousness of the list...also exciting...less so recently...) But I think that if the Squeak insiders really believe that "kids in fifth grade are able to master etoys" (A. Raab, 2/10/03) without one or more Squeak insiders hovering close by, they are sadly mistaken! (This is similar to a problem a fellow named Papert had vis a vis the "learnability" of Logo in the late 70's - early 80's....)
"So why should we even listen to this guy?" ("Maybe he really can't even program his way out of a paper bag...") Well, maybe some of you have stopped already. I've made many false starts in Squeak, and the responsiveness of Ned Konz, Karl Ramberg, and Stephane Ducasse (to name a few) to my previous postings is part of what keeps me around ... now I'm responding, instead of Rachel, to Hannes Hirzel's request.
But we need "customers" like you. What are your interests in doing with Squeak?
***I want to see -- and show others -- a viable learning path through etoys to Morphic-Squeak proper.***
I have some "field notes" from an attempt I made to show etoys to teachers-to-be in UCSD's Teacher Education Program that I would love to share with people on this list. Some of the contents border on painful, but if I could only answer all *their* questions (and remember, if I am twice-, these teachers are three-times-removed from Squeak-insiderness), I would be able to document some of the projects on Alan's "Partial list of Etoy Projects" -- posted to Squeakland 2/11/03 (but not SqueakDev!). Get a load of these (the total "partial" list was almost 40 lines long):
Orbits Springs Weighing Gradient following - Salmon and Clownfish Tree Growing Epidemics Multiple Mentalities Grey Walter Conditioned Response Learning Circuit Models Anyone who could create projects like these in any programmable medium, I'd say, would have a serious leg up on "real" programming by anyone's hard-nosed definition of that elusive (and ever-changing) concept. My students (same ones as above) wrote programs in NetLogo, Microworlds (a descendant of Logo), and Stagecast Creator, including a "Turtle Epidemic" model in NetLogo for which I wrote the tutorial (see http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/resources.shtml) and a "Food Fight" game in Stagecast Creator, for which I'd love to be able to write the "etoys tutorial", if I could only see how to do several simple things in Etoys, for example
- have an agent (smiley) create another agent (burger) in the
space next to him
- have an agent (smiley) send a message to a counter agent (count
down) each time he "uses up" a burger, and another message to a counter-scorer agent (count up) each time one of his burgers hits his opponent ...just to name two.
So, speaking of "viable learning paths", does anyone have a suggestion for one for *me*? Who wants to respond to all the questions my teacher-students raised in my field notes? Who wants to help me complete all the projects on Alan's list?
If *I* can't figure out how to do this stuff on my own, there's no way any of the teachers I teach -- even after they've been thoroughly Balzano-indoctrinated to the virtues of programming and completed my more-rigorous-than-99%-of-other-teacher-ed-computer-courses course -- will be able to figure it out either.
Respectfully submitted, Jerry Balzano
Dr. Gerald J. Balzano Teacher Education Program Dept of Music Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition Cognitive Science Program UC San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093 (619) 822-0092 gjbalzano@ucsd.edu
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