Hi Phil,
Almost right ;-) What you want to do is to prepare everything up to the point where you have the transparent playfield (so you see the pattern of dots appear through it). Then, paint the arrow you want to use for connecting the dots, set its pen trail options accordingly (pen down, arrow heads etc) and put it *into* the book so that it appears in the right place on top of the dots (but in the book!).
Now comes the magic: In the books 'red halo menu' there is a submenu called 'book' and here is an entry 'save as new-page prototype'. Select this item (sorry, no feedback). Now click on the top-right button in the book to get "more controls" for it. When you then hit the "+" button you will get a new blank page with the only thing being the arrow you've drawn. You can navigate through all your pages using the "<" and ">" button and you will see each drawing you have made. So each time you hit the "+" you will have a new page which you can make some drawing on (and if things go horribly wrong you can delete it using the "-").
Keep in mind though that there's one big gotcha here if you're going to use this technique. When you go to another page, the viewer will still show the object from the last page you were on. This can *very* easily get extremely confusing as you never know which page your arrow will be running along (I just tried and it confused me like hell). I think it might be better to have only a fixed number of pages and different "arrows" for each of them (using colors or different shapes) so that it is easy for the kids to differentiate between them (easy to do: just set up everything like I said in the above, then make up new pages and redraw the arrow by just filling it with a different color; finally get rid of the extra controls by pressing the top right button in the book again).
As for 'saving the drawings', there is a simple technique which might be useful. You can save any object as either jpeg, bmp, or gif file by going into the red halo menu and, in the 'export' menu choose the appropriate image type. Now this is a bit bothersome if you want to do it often, but here's an easy way to automate it:
Go into the viewer of the playfield holding the pen trails and into its 'miscellaneous' category. You will find something saying playfield do menu item 'send to back'. Change the 'send to back' into 'GIF file' (yeah, this looks awkward but it needs to be the exact wording from the menu) and press enter to accept it. Now press the "fire" button. You should be prompted with the name for the GIF file and when you enter and accept it, your playfield will have been written to the image file.
Okay, now drag the command into the world to make a new script. Rename this script to 'makeGif' or similar. Then, in the viewer go into the 'scripts' category and click on the menu icon right next to the 'makeGif' script. Ask it to hand you a 'button to fire this script' and place it somewhere in the world. Close (not destroy!) both the 'makeGif' script as well as the viewer and you have a perfect little button which will make a snapshot of your playfield whenever you ask it to.
Hope this helps, - Andreas
-----Original Message----- From: squeakland-bounces@squeakland.org [mailto:squeakland-bounces@squeakland.org] On Behalf Of Phil Firsenbaum Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2003 4:07 PM To: Kim Rose Cc: squeakland@squeakland.org Subject: [Squeakland] Multiple copies of pen trails
Kim, Stuck again! I'm working on a little project which has to do with exploring patterns in nature. It's based on a terrific book I found in the library(Patterns in Nature by Peter Stevens). Initially, I want kids to be able to explore the various ways of connecting the dots you see below. They've got to connect all the dots (using Arrowhead) so that they all link up with the center dot and any two dots connect along only one path. It turns out that there are various ways of accomplishing this and the different patterns that are created have different geometrical attributes. I had the opportunity to work with a (5th grade) class yesterday on this project and the results were interesting...kids were fascinated and most seemed really engaged. What I'd like to do next is somehow have multiple copies of the pattern of dots appear so that kids could have more than one attempt at connecting the dots without erasing previous versions. I've tried putting a (transparent) book on top of the pattern, but that doesn't allow me to have different versions on each page. I'll even settle for being able to capture each version (as an exported graphic) but that doesn't seem to work either. If I export the playfield that I'm using below the pattern of dots isn't captured! Any ideas/suggestions?
Phil