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.