[Squeakland] Squeak in Japan

-- Dear friends and colleagues, Greetings from me, at 2:00 AM PST, having just returned yesterday from a 10 day trip to Japan. Alan, Yoshiki, Roxanne Maloney and I just completed a very successful 10 day trip to Tokyo and Kyoto. I believe most of you know that last year, the Kyoto city schools started a three year pilot to use Squeak in several schools. They are starting with 2 elementary schools, 2 middle schools and 2 high schools. Currently, the strongest participants are one elementary school and one high school. We met Thoru Yamamoto, the author/illustrator of "Play with Squeak" (see this page and scroll http://www.squeakland.org/sqmedia/books/squeakerbooks.html) I've attached a picture of him here. His book has already sold over 6,000 copies in Japan! We are planning on translating his book into English. We also have made arrangements for "Powerful ideas in the Classroom" to be translated into Japanese so that it may be used as part of the schools program there. We visited Horikawa High School where students presented their curriculum (in a Squeak-based presentation) and a few Etoys they had created. I've attached 2 more pictures showing student sharing here. The Etoy in the picture was created by a young lady to help people learn about how Japanese live and their culture. Her butterfly is animated and controlled with a joystick. As the butterfly is flown around the house, messages are revealed to describe parts of the room, such as the "tokonoma" or niche that holds the scroll and the ikebana -- the flower arrangement. Visually, it is one of the most beautiful etoys I've seen. We'll return to Japan at the end of January for curriculum development meetings and a more technical conference called "C5" -- a Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing with not only contributors from Japan, but other parts of Asia. We hope to have some of our Asian colleagues come to the next U.S. SqueakFest in 2004. We'll put more text and picutres on the Squeakland site soon. In the meantime, I hope everyone is well and enjoying the fall. Please let us know what you are up to and share your or your students' projects! cheers, Kim