Re: [Squeakland] suggested 1 hour squeak exercise for various student age groups?

Hi, Daniel -

I suggest you use the "Powerful Ideas in the Classroom" book and start the kids off with the "Drive-A-Car" Etoys would be ideal.

http://www.squeakland.org/sqmedia/books/kimbjbook.html

Give them a little while to get comfortable with the painting system and then let them create a car and play with driving it around. Then, they can make a steering wheel to navigate the car, and go on to make a road and drive it along the road. The older kids may get to the point of creating a "robot car" that will drive along the road on its own . This is all in the book and our suggested starting point. An hour is pretty short -- you might see if there's any way to extend your time to at least 90 minutes.

Also, showing a portion of the Squeakers DVD (at the end, perhaps) could be interesting for the kids to see what other kids have done (i.e., "Jenny's Pig Race").

http://www.squeakland.org/sqmedia/movies/html/clips.html

Thanks for your interest -- let us know how it goes! -- Kim

At 3:15 PM -0600 2/4/06, Daniel Green wrote:

Looks like our local university will have the opportunity to lead a 1 hour programming class for various age groups (5-8, 9-12, 13-16) for the local science club. We're considering using squeak instead of something like visual basic / real basic, but I'm not sure where to find what's been done before. The class will be taught on networked laptops, so something motivating like be the first to construct an e- toy that achieves some goal, etc., is the kind of thing that might be scalable across age ranges. Any suggestions or pointers to short courses that have been given in similar circumstances?

Thanks for any input or pointers to more appropriate forums.

Best regards,

-- DanG Daniel Green William Jewell College / Park University Kansas City, Missouri _______________________________________________ Squeakland mailing list Squeakland@squeakland.org http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland