Hi --
Yep, we should have more complete documentation in English, especially on
the media objects. (E.g. the Japanese and Spanish documentation includes
translations of ours, plus some very good stuff done in those languages
in those countries.)
But the book "Powerful Ideas in the Classroom" is still a very
good idea as a starting point because most good Etoys are thought up as a
way to help children learn an idea (and generally not as a way to learn a
particular programming technique -- the programming style in Etoys is
different).
The tradeoffs are interesting. On the one hand it is pretty easy to get
7th and 8th graders to do a dynamic ecology of fish and food sources from
scratch, whereas the AP version of this in high school in Java is deemed
difficult enough that the high schoolers don't get to program it but are
giving the programs to study and change parameters on.
Etoys is all about children being able to make fun working versions of
interesting ideas from scratch, and learning much more about the ideas
than when force-fed with them. Considerable thought on the part of the
children's mentors is often required to set up a curriculum that is a
nice balance between the way children think and do, the ideas, and what
is most natural to do in Etoys.
Basically, every object in Etoys "is the same" for most things,
plus, for some objects (such as playfields, etc.) there will be a few
extra categories in their viewers for idiosyncratic behaviors. Just
poking around and trying things (which is what the kids do) will reveal a
lot.
For example, the "world" (the desktop object) is a kind of
playfield, and all playfields have a "playfield" category, and
in this category are variables that hold the mouse coordinates relative
to that playfield.
Every script can do a loop in parallel with other scripts, so there are
an unlimited number of parallel behaviors possible. These scripts can be
controlled by other scripts (look in the "scripting" category
for each object). Typical loops can be done by initializing in one script
and then telling another script to start ticking (and this script can
have a test tile that can decide if the loop should stop, etc.).
A little context: Etoys is kind of a "demo that wouldn't die".
It was originally aimed for a particular age of children (from about 7-8
to about 11-12) to be an authoring medium for fun projects that could
have an underlying "powerful idea" or two, that could be
absorbed Montessori style. So the goal was not to teach anything like
standard programming, but to make it easy for children to e.g. use and
learn the ideas of vectors, calculus, feedback, systems ecologies, media
models, etc., while pursuing projects that seemed fun to them.
Human beings (even really smart ones) have a hard time coming up with
ideas that are better than mediocre. For example, if you put a piano in a
classroom, the children will explore it, and develop a "chopsticks
culture" with it, but they won't invent for themselves how to play a
keyboard instrument (it took centuries for experts to work it out). But
every child can be taught to play the piano. Similarly, the
children will not invent or discover important ideas in mathematics by
themselves. But every child can be taught a powerful version of
the calculus of vectors, and many other kinds of advanced mathematics.
And both of these can be taught as a kind of play.
If you give children a medium to explore, they will generally wind up
doing stories and games with it (in large part because that is how nature
has set all of us up to learn when we are children). For example, Etoys
is used widely in a number of places in the world. The places that
emphasize "creativity", "discovery learning",
"free exploration", etc., all wind up with lots of stuff done
by children, but virtually all of it uses simple animations and multiple
tasking to act out stories and games. This is no surprise (it took humans
100,000 years to invent math and another 2000 to invent science). If we
are interested in having children learn non-obvious powerful ideas --
e.g. in math and science -- we have to scaffold their learning and
discovery by careful curriculum design.
This teaching doesn't have to feel like the kids are being put in a
lock-step chain gang. It can be much more like teaching and learning an
established sport or musical instrument. There are parts that are almost
impossible to invent, and thus have to be shown and practised. But with
these parts there are large elements of free joyful play.
We suggest using at least 3 phases for each idea.
- The first is a guided creation of something interesting -- for example,
how to make a robot vehicle on the screen that will follow edges. This
can be done in a number of ways including Socratic leading questions, but
basically it is giving the children something they would not think up for
themselves. But as David Ausubel pointed out "People learn on
the fringes of what they know".
- Now that the children know something, they can be given a specific
challenge -- such as "Come up with a car and a road where the car
will stay on the road". There are 5 or 6 ways of doing this and most
children working singly or in pairs will find one of them. A few of these
are elegant, and a few children will find these. Sharing the solutions as
demos gives the children a sense that such problems are not only
solvable, but there is more than one solution.
- The third stage is open play, where the children now know enough to
think of many different fun ways to use what they've just done (and many
of their ideas will be in the forms of games or stories). For example,
some of the "middle of the road" solutions lend themselves to
making a multilane racing track with multiple vehicles and using the
random number tile to generate random speeds to make the race difficult
to predict.
The way we've set up Etoys is with a uniform rich object model and a very
simple set of scripting abilities, but with easy multiple tasking. From
this we've asked ourselves what projects that involve powerful ideas can
be relatively easily made from the simple ingredients. There are lots,
and they fill more than a school year's worth of time. This is why the
project based documentation is not such a bad idea. It's worth while to
look at the kinds of things that have been done with the current
ingredients, and this will help with the different style of programming
that is used.
However, children younger than 7 really need a somewhat different
interface. And children older than 11 need more ingredients (both
scripting features -- such as case based control structures, better event
structures, etc. -- and expression building features -- e.g. to more
easily build complex expressions from left to right instead of just from
the top down, etc.). We are going to do the latter over the next year,
and the former a year after that. But for (say) 5th graders, the current
set of materials seems rich enough (for powerful idea purposes).
The documentation is going to get a little more useful and detailed
because Etoys will be on the "$100 Laptop" project of the One
Laptop Per Child organization (
http://www.laptop.org ) . The test builds of this machine are just
starting to happen, and we are starting to write more detailed
documentation on the OLPC wiki (
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_EToys ). This is not worth looking at
today, but should have quite a bit of useful stuff a few weeks from
now.
Please don't hesitate to ask more questions. We are happy to
help.
Cheers,
Alan
At 12:12 PM 10/31/2006, Guyren Howe wrote:
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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