Alan,
Thanks for the detailed response. Let me summarise what I am trying to do.
For background, I have served my time as a professional programmer (C, C++, Java, Ada, Perl, Python, Haskell, but no Smalltalk) for 15 years or so, but recently left all that to become a maths teacher. I am looking for ways of presenting mathematical ideas in an interesting and dynamic way to my classes of 11 to 18 year olds, and also for software that the students themselves can get their hands on.
It seems to me that Smalltalk and Squeak in particular (via Morphic) provide a very malleable medium for creating such dynamic interactive stuff. By contrast, Powerpoint, for instance, simply forces me to follow a carefully prepared script, rather than allowing for interaction and investigation in a classroom context.
I have done a tiny amount of Smalltalk programming to produce some classroom demonstrators of simple concepts, but find sadly I have little time to do anything substantial. So, onto Morphic and/or Etoys and direct manipulation, which I have used successfully to illustrate some ideas in the classroom.
What I like about Squeak is: - direct manipulation with Morphic is very productive - Etoy scripting sometimes does just what I want, and when it does, it's a quick way of building something (perhaps the balance will change as I get better at Smalltalk) - there's some good stuff on SqueakMap
Questions I have include these:
1. When I find something doesn't work, I'm not sure if it's because it broke recently, or never worked. This is part of the "which version should I be using?" question. For example, if what I'm building starts filling up the screen, I saw I could shift-drag to select a group of objects, and use Extras->Put In a Window, which would enable me to temporarily minimize a group of morphs. But this gives MessageNotUnderstood. Is there a version of Squeak in which this works? Would it be easily fixable in the current developer version?
2. From what you say, and my experiments, it seems Etoys still works OK in the latest developer version (well, I have been using 3.9). But discussion on squeak-dev seems to suggest Etoys are not a priority in this development strand, so do I need to be using a different version to maintain a good experience of Etoys?
3. The Squeak plugin looks like a good way to deploy Squeak content to others in school. But I'm not sure what to do if something I want to use is not in the Squeakland image.
I guess I'm halfway between dabbling in Smalltalk and dabbling in Etoys, and am not sure which version is right for me.
I think I've rambled too much here. Sorry about that.
cheers, Simon