Hi all,
we had our last education team meeting yesterday. Here are the notes: http://wiki.squeakland.org/display/sq/2009/06/18/education+team+meeting+June...
You can find the older notes here: http://wiki.squeakland.org/pages/viewrecentblogposts.action?key=sq
Feel free to discuss and comment!
Greetings, Rita
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education team meeting June, 18 participants: Randy, Marta, Tim, Rita
Tim told us about the pilot project that has started in Haiti on monday, June 8. There are not just kids, but also teachers attending the Etoys workshops, who can then teach other teachers. Tim has been contacted by OLPC Philippines, they will use Etoys there.
For the Etoys courseware a very important thing is to get a template, so that we can ask others to help developing it. The outline for the basic unit is 1. sketches 2. halos 3. viewers 4. scripts 5. books 6. variables 7. animation 8. supplies 9. tests 10. exploring
Randy has started with units about physical motion, they are based on a story, because that's a good way for children to learn things. He did send the projects to the education team to get feedback. On the outline for the lessons we say that each lessons should be 1 hour long, but that's not easy to do, some topics are more complicated than others. But than you don't have to spend all the time on the computer, with some topics we could provide ideas for classroom discussions etc. So for shorter lessons there is space for related things.
Marta said she has volunteers who could help us with the course material once we have the template done. They can help with translations, too.
Randy mentionend the "big ideas" behind the different sciences covered in school, that we should have in mind when developing course material:
physical science - model and scale life science - system earth science - cycle
Tim asked Marta if the name "Etoys To Go" for Etoys on a flash drive would be ok in Brazil, Marta said it is. Then he told us, that usb drives are noticeably cheaper with less memory, so maybe we should have "Etoys To Go for Windows", "Etoys To Go for Linux" etc. Most people would know which OS they would need. We will see how much memory the Etoys To Go will actually need.
Tim suggested to DVDs with screencasts of the course material for Squeakfest.
Marta told us about a problem of Etoys with a brazilian linux version, it isn't working. She will provide a link for the software team, that they can have a look at it. The government is providing more laptops to schools and teachers from that schools are coming to Squeakfest and of course would like to use Etoys.
Tim brought up the idea of two new mailing lists: one for teacher and one for technical things. The reason to split would be not to bore teachers with technical details. Rita said, that developers often discuss topics relevant for teachers, additional features or changes will affect their work. Since there is not that much traffic on the squeakland list, there is no urgent need to split soon. The main list should be education-focused and hopefully developers will not discuss deep-down technical details there, that should be on a separate list. But generally issues should be talked about on the squeakland list, hopefully in a way that doesn't scares the teachers away.
Randy was impressed by the Etoys video with the MCU interface that has been sent today on the list. He proposed to have a lesson using hardware in the course ware.
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