Hi Yoshiki,
[Squeakland] MixedMorph for kids
Yoshiki Ohshima yoshiki at squeakland.org Tue May 8 11:34:04 PDT 2007
Subbu,
My 6-year old's favorite object is the
"MixedMorph" in Squeak 3.9 because
of
the way it handles like putty. She uses it to
create all kinds of shapes
and
pictures. She misses it in Squeakland plugin
image.
Will MixedMorph make it into the Plugin image?
There was good discussion with Jerome about it,
but I still have
"mixed" feeling toward including that to the
Squeakland image (and the
OLPC image). This is due to the amount of
modification it makes and I
have not figure out what kind of side-effects it
might have.
What test do you wish it to pass?
What might it do that would make it unacceptable?
It is large because it had a chance to develop over a long period of time. I do not think it is too far off of main stream for inclusion and it comes with big benefits. (Subbu's daugther's smile for one).
I have a chicken and egg problem here in selling this to you. You won't have a feel for what it does until you include it and you won't include it until you have a feel for what it does.
This started when I set myself to overcoming the limitations of the old curve morph and in particular the one sharp bend that was always present. I fixed several other bugs in polygons as I came across them. When I had achieved that Edgar asked for a way to get puzzle pieces and I created MixedCurveMorphs in response to that. Because my programming style tends to make my code easier to maintain and modify than the original code I could make swift progress.
I still want to see what kids will do if they have the expessive power these morphs deliver. I recommend them to you. Subbu recommends them to you. Subbu's daughter reminds me of why I put in the self funded time and effort.
It is in your hands.
(Not that it have a bug or something, but it is a big
commitment to change
all polygons.)
For your 6-years old, CurveMorph with a bit more
control points
would do?
There is a fundamental difference between a smooth closed curve and a smooth closed curve with endpoints. The old CurveMorph used the same smoothing for and open line as for a closed curve. The sharp bend is where the two endpoints meet.
The mixed curves get their expressive power from using a true closed curve smoothing. Too enable backward compatiblity I left the option of turning that off by controling a preference flag. And I left CurvierMorphs do the smoother smoothing and CurveMorphs do the old smoothing. I tried to demonstrate in that way that the changes were not too radical.
For older kids, the OLPC version has Etoys
scriptable polygons so
that they can actually write tile scripts to change
the shape of a
polygon. One time I tried to merge them together,
but the effort
didn't go far enough. That would be still nice to
have...
If you choose to give it another go I am available to assist.
Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace
____________________________________________________________________________________ Don't pick lemons. See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos. http://autos.yahoo.com/new_cars.html