Jerry --

I think you should first separate out the Squeak system -- an experimental version of Smalltalk that is quite beyond the scope of this list, which is for parents and teachers -- from the Squeak "Etoys" which is aimed at children and *is* discussed on this list. So complaining about 2000 posts to SqueakDev on this list is just confusing for most of the folks here -- it's like complaining that LISP is big and comprehensive -- it's not an enduser system, etc.

I will confine myself to the tradeoffs with the Squeak etoys. First, we really do need better documentation, even for a system that is still being tested by us. We have found that it takes about 3 years in a classroom to get a good set of tests and we are just now in that 3rd year. The results of these 3 years have been written up by teacher BJ Allen-Conn and Kim Rose in a "book of 10 projects" -- they have done a great job! -- and drafts of this book will be available online not too far in the future. Another terrific contribution is from Sebastian Hergott's 8th grade class in Toronto. They did lots of projects and he got them to write them up as documented examples. These two books together supply lots of examples and should help to bridge some of the gaps in documentation.

However, I should say a little about the history of etoys. They were originally not aimed at classrooms but as 10-20 minute projects supplied on the web for parents and their children to do together. I stripped out as many features as I could and tried to come up with a system that could do "100 examples" pretty straightforwardly. The documentation that was intended here was to have been to teach parents how to do the examples so they and their kids could have a good experience. For several reasons, this plan did not work out at Disney. But BJ saw it and wanted to try etoys in her 5th grade classroom. I was initially against the idea because I thought that etoys were not complete enough for that venue. But she and Kim Rose decided to do it anyway. Six weeks later they started to show me some really good results, and I realized that it would be worth doing a 3 year experiment to see how well the etoys -- even with some of their lacks -- would work out with 10 and 11 year olds.

The results have been excellent -- in the proper environment most children have no trouble getting joyously creative and fluent -- and hence the forthcoming book by BJ and Kim to help other teachers and parents achieve the same results.

Our previous plans to make a kind of "superhypercard" and then get version 2 of etoys from that much more comprehensive design did not work out at Disney, and it wasn't until recently that we've been able to get that plan going again. I think this is more like the system you want, and you'll have a chance to try it out this summer.

To zero in on a real critique of today's etoys, it is helpful to confine discussion to 10 year olds and up, since essentially all the experience that we and others have had are in this age range. The etoys have changed very little in several years, in part because of the testing that is going on, so comments such as "too fast moving" really have to do with the larger Squeak community over at www.squeak.org. Here I think the problems are not so much lack of documentation as lack of particular kinds of documentation, such as detailed tutorials and project workbooks. The user-tested books mentioned above should help this.

Let me turn to another area, and tell a story that I witnessed recently. I was visiting a classroom with a really terrific teacher, who was truly ecstatic when his children could figure out something before him (we need more of these kinds of teachers!). But he brought up a problem that he couldn't see how to do. He wanted to general random colors, and had seen that the red, green and blue blends are given in the color picker. In etoys colors are not manifested as three numbers (we possibly should, but don't) though they are in the larger Squeak system (and in many other ways). So he didn't see how to make up colors, especially random ones. My thought was to put a bunch of objects (such as ellipses) into a holder, give them different colors and then do random picking by moving the cursor holder's cursor <- random to get an object whose color can be gotten at. We did that and he was happy. But then we saw a child who came up with a much better way to do this. He just put splotches of paint on the desktop and ran a Squeak player (like a car) over the splotches in a random "drunkard's walk" and used "color under" to pick up the color as a value. My thought on seeing that was that it was the child who found the "etoys way" of solving this problem, and that the general solution in this fashion would involve using the color rainbow of a color picker to supply a wide range of colors for the car to wander about on. My second thought was that both the teacher and I were somewhat trapped in our pasts. The teacher had done something with color numbers in the past and wanted to do it again. I went to a table lookup solution that I had done many times in the past for other kinds of problems, and this worked. The child went at the heart of the matter with a completely simple and concrete approach that was quite brilliant and original.

One of the reasons I'm telling this story is that today's etoys -- that lack a wide and comprehensive range of features that "they should have" -- are best approached through the kinds of projects that *can* be done really nicely using the features that are there. There are more than enough such projects to occupy a full year (really more like 3 years) of work and play by children. As for the larger scope that is eventually needed, I'm hoping we can accomplish this by the time today's projects are used up.

Now to another one of your comments in yesterday's email. You wrote: At 6:44 PM -0800 3/10/03, Jerry Balzano wrote:

Get a load of these (the total "partial" list was almost 40 lines long):

Orbits Springs Weighing Gradient following - Salmon and Clownfish Tree Growing Epidemics Multiple Mentalities Grey Walter Conditioned Response Learning Circuit Models Anyone who could create projects like these in any programmable medium, I'd say, would have a serious leg up on "real" programming by anyone's hard-nosed definition of that elusive (and ever-changing) concept.

I think I agree here. I've done each of these strictly in etoys to see what the process is like and to understand how one would explain the process to both teachers and children. Most of these projects are aimed at older children (such as Sebastian's 8th graders and older), and I think are quite doable, but they haven't been tested yet with adults and children of a good age and mindset. Just to provide a few more comments on some of these:

*Orbits* is easily done in etoys if you understand Newton's inverse square law, vectors (and that each etoy player -- like a logo turtle -- is a vector and can do vector arithmetic). The script that does the work is about 4 lines of tiles long and is a pretty direct translation of the inverse square law using "increase by" of vectors. It's a very clean script. Here quite a bit has to be worked up to for most teachers and other adults. There are hurdles of mathematics, science, and learning more about how to use etoys. The scaffolding would require many projects to be done earlier, including the accelleration and gravity projects that were easily done by BJ's 5th graders. I think a good next one is to do a spaceship floating in space without a gravity field to get a sense of how velocity is often (usually) in a different direction than the ship is pointing.

*Springs* are fun to do, and easy to script in etoys if you go through the exercise of deciding that the force on a spring is proportional to the displacement and in the opposite direction. I think there is quite a bit of scaffolding needed to do the science part.

*Weighing* is part of doing a real roller coaster in etoys. An insight is required here. Most people get stumped about needing sine and cosine, etc., to find the forces on an inclined plane. But in fact, you can "weigh" them using a postal scale on an inclined scale. You can make up a simple table -- using a holder -- of the forces every few degrees and this is quite good enough to make a real roller coaster in etoys.

*Gradient following* If you make a gradient using the graphic properties sheet you can do tests on it using "Brightness under". This allows a simple feedback program to be written (very much like the follow the road ones) that will cause a simulated object to follow and find the darker or lighter regions of the gradient. (Gradient following is a feature in starLogo, but I think people should learn about it by actually scripting it.)

*Tree Growing* Most people have cognitive difficulties with recursion, but one nice way to look at trees is recursively. This is a conflict. Because etoys can make new objects via copies (see below) it is possible to bypass recursion altogether in favor of a branching activation. This turned out to be a very clear script and a good model for other kinds of "recursion changed to branching activation" problems.

*Epidemics* have a wide range. The easiest ones are just having infected objects bump into noninfected ones and transmit the infection. This is just a few lines of script to do.

*Multiple mentalities* comes from the Vivarium work we did 15 years ago. Here we have separate scripts or even objects that represent parallel and mostly independent drives of the simulated animal. The main thinking that is needed is to figure out which of the drives should be allowed to control the animal. This is easy for two (a simple comparison) and needs something like a sort for more (it is actually just looking for the one with the largest "urgency", so it's a matter of using the "max" operator to perculate the largest urgency one in a holder.

*Grey Walter* conditioned reflex learning model. Here it is hard to guess about the appropriate age for this wonderful etoy. My guess is high school since Grey Walter's model is nicely subtle. (He did this with a single vacuum tube in 1949, so parsimony was the order of the day. He got all of his power from very careful reasoning and clear thinking about a simple model to do this.) Once you understand how he did it (I made a diagram to show the 7 steps you have to go through) it was quite easy to do in etoys and generated a nice set of dynamic graphs for the animal's "state of mind".

*Circuit Models* I've not quite figured out an appropriate approach here. One way is to use the connectors stuff of Ned Konz and propagate signals though his objects. Several folks have done this, most notably a high school student who is working with us -- he went to the heart of the matter and decided not to do batteries and bulbs per se but to see about simulating logic.

My students (same ones as above) wrote programs in NetLogo, Microworlds (a descendant of Logo),

This is a product

and Stagecast Creator

so is this. Etoys is an experimental system that is still quite a ways from being a finished packaged product.

, including a "Turtle Epidemic" model in NetLogo for which I wrote the tutorial (see http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/resources.shtml) and a "Food Fight" game in Stagecast Creator, for which I'd love to be able to write the "etoys tutorial", if I could only see how to do several simple things in Etoys, for example

• have an agent (smiley) create another agent (burger) in the

space next to him

Let's suppose that smiley is in a playfield called "fastfood".

smiley create smiley's temp <- burger copy fastfood include smiley's temp smiley's temp's x <- smiley's x + 25 smiley's temp's y <- smiley's y

I found "copy" and "include" just by going through the views of the two objects and seeing what the balloon help told me. This is the documentation that is there, but most people don't use it. I found that I could make a player valued variable by looking at the menu item "change data type", etc.

• have an agent (smiley) send a message to a counter agent (count

down) each time he "uses up" a burger, and another message to a counter-scorer agent (count up) each time one of his burgers hits his opponent

burger scoring Test burger's color sees <color of boundary> Yes smiley's score decrease by 1 Test burger's color sees <color of opponent> Yes smiley's score increase by 1

...just to name two.

So, speaking of "viable learning paths", does anyone have a suggestion for one for *me*? Who wants to respond to all the questions my teacher-students raised in my field notes?

I do.

Who wants to help me complete all the projects on Alan's list?

I have done these projects. I need help in explaining them in a way useful to parents and teachers.

If *I* can't figure out how to do this stuff on my own, there's no way any of the teachers I teach -- even after they've been thoroughly Balzano-indoctrinated to the virtues of programming and completed my more-rigorous-than-99%-of-other-teacher-ed-computer-courses course -- will be able to figure it out either.

I don't necessarily agree here, but your point is well taken. I think that quite a bit of success for different kinds of people is the match up between types of thinking, types of motivation, and the kinds of materials and scaffolding available. Some teachers have been amazingly successful with our inadequate documentation and others have been less successful that one would expect, given the amount of documentaiton that is there. Many children who like to explore and don't want to read documentation have done even better. Some children are quite stumped without explicit help (but that's what teachers are supposed to be for.)

But the clear lesson is that we need to provide enough coverage for a wide range of styles of learning. Please continue to be interested and to help.

Cheers,

Alan --

Hi John --

Again, this is really a squeak.org question, since squeakland.org is *only* about the etoys part of squeak. The short answer is the universal tiles were one of several experiments we did to investigate making an enduser scripting system of much wider scope than etoys. Some of it worked very well, but we judged the gestalt to be below threshold.

Cheers,

Alan

-----

At 5:13 PM -0500 3/11/03, John Voiklis wrote:

Hello Everyone,

This series of questions, and especially the reference to the as yet unrealized intermediate visual programming/scripting environment, reminds me of a question that went unanswered a few weeks ago.

What are the universal tiles? Do they have anything to do with the intermediate interface that was mentioned? I have played ever so slightly with universal tiles; they remind me a bit of the tile scriptor that I discovered accidentally when working in the system browser, but otherwise I have not seen any substantive difference between regular and universal tiles. I am very likely missing something.

Who uses universal tiles and why; or, to put a different spin on it, who should use universal tiles and for what purposes? Finally, since I mentioned it, what is the tile scriptor...could I do full-fledged Squeak/Smalltalk programming using a tile interface...how (this last extended question may be more appropriate to another list)?

I know that to ask these questions means, to a certain extent, that universal tiles are not for me. Then again, I had similar questions about Squeak itself three years ago.

Thanks,

John

--

Skipped content of type multipart/alternative

Hi,

The attached three-page handout shows all the etoy viewer commands "at a glance" and has proven to be a great help to etoy novices who are trying to get an overview of what's possible and what's where, and even for more experienced etoy users who want to save a little screen space or time clicking around to the different panes. Also included are screen-captures of the "balloon help" messages for each command (strictly speaking they are not all commands of course), saving additional mouse-over time for the user who wants a more verbose reminder of what each thing does. Enjoy!

- Jerry Balzano

Hi Eric --

Most email clients have a size filter that stops large downloads until you say you want them. Does yours have this feature?

Cheers,

Alan

-------

At 6:09 PM -0500 3/11/03, Eric Cornwell wrote:

Jerry- Your generosity and enthusiasm are laudable, but please bear in mind that some of us on this list are still on dial-up connections. For us a half-megabyte attachment turns a quick email check into a very time consuming process. Maybe there is a place people could post squeak goodies and just email the links? -- Eric Cornwell

--

I've been reading the thread since the first post by Jerry Balzano, and would like to make a few comments.

On Tue, 11 Mar 2003 17:45, John Steinmetz wrote:

Thank you for these comments, Jerry. I think you're bringing up important points.

I think it needs to be emphasized over and over again that Squeak is a research system. It is not a completed product, but a work in progress, and that causes ome of the frustrations teachers and other novices experience. Perhaps more could be done on the Squeakland site to make this clear.

Yes indeed. That site is very professionally put together and does have a dot.com address. In spite of the "Under construction but ready for playing". Without explicitly saying so, you give the very distinct impression that Squeak is now ready to be used in the school and home by "mere mortals". Although I have been around computers for something like thirty years now, I have found learning Smalltalk to be one of the most difficult intellectual exercises I have ever attempted. There is so much of it to learn and the approach to the system is simply out of this world when compared to the normal edit a file, compile it, and crash it cycle.

Perhaps you might like to consider making the forward from the .com address not quite so transparent, and reinforce the experimental nature of Squeak right there on the home page.

Any programming environment provides challenges to non-expert users, and expert help is often needed. In my opinion many who promote computers as tools for learning say too little about the amount of support teachers and students need in order to get good results.

I'd go so far as to say that in a normal

I'm sure most people on this list are excited about the promise of Squeak--many kinds of promises, really. It's astounding that Squeak has come so far, and that has a lot to do with people helping one another. Clearly, to get to the next stage, with ordinary users and ordinary teachers being able to use Squeak, much more needs to happen.

Yes, that's true, but please don't dumb it down totally by removing the lovely advanced features like the development environment etc. Just hide them. _The_ feature with which I have had by far the most success in a school setting is the Alice system, I had a very intelligent ten year old girl typing commands in like as if there was no tomorrow, and we ended up with Alice waving her arms about and Rabbit playing the drum silently. After that she asked "Can we program this like I can do Basic on my computer at home". Fortunately I had installed the full kit and merely hidden the tabs, so we were able to open a workspace and do a little bit of Smalltalk scripting to print out the multiplication tables.

The book by BJ Conn and Kim Rose is one step in that direction. But you are right to remind us not to confuse possibilities and promises with what is really doable now. While working to make some of these possibilites real, the Squeak community needs to try to stay clear about what's not real yet.

I seem to remember that a few years ago there was a "Stable Squeak" project. It seems to have disappeared. Anybody know what happened to it? Anyway what about having a double release scheme a bit like the Linux kernel? UserSqueak - Stable, and DevelopmentSqueak - Unstable. Possibly with mail-lists to go with them. I found the squeak-dev list had far too much traffic for the time I have available, to say nothing of the fact that many of the threads were intellectually beyond me, yet, in contrast, up until now this list has appeared to be virtually moribund. Is there a SqueakUser list?

One other thought: Squeak is interesting not just because it makes certain things easy, but also because it is rich and complex. Rich, complex things (music, sports, math, art, etc.) are often difficult, often need very good helpers to be present, and sometimes need a huge amount of infrastructure.

The other thing that everybody is under so much pressure in the school setting. What's really needed is time. There's never enough of it.

For instance, I am a musician today only because my school had a very good music teacher and a pile of instruments made by expert craftspeople and music manufactured by expert composers and publishers--and my parents got me lessons with still another expert, and I was able to play in youth orchestras with more expertise at hand. Even with all this help and encouragement, and even in such a supportive context, it took many years for me to get any good at all. Most of the helpers were able to provide very satisfying projects at every stage--even students who did not become professional musicians were able to have a good time participating.

Probably very few schools can offer the kind of infrastructure for computer learning that my school music program offered. Yet I think computers need the same kind of multilayered help and expertise, and a supportive context of enthusiasm and encouragement for the activity.

Without doubt that's the case. I don't know about the situation is other countries but here in litle NZ the use of computers in school is very patchy. The government is spending a small fortune on providing the hardware, operating systems and 'office' oriented software, but there is not only a distinct fear of the huge abyss of the unknown, but sadly more often than just occasionally a misplaced sense of pride in ignorance. This means that the vast majority of computers are badly underutilised and often end up just being web-surfing sets, glorified paint-brushes or typewriters.

Maybe we need to lose the idea that doing interesting and valuable things on the computer can happen in isolation. One of the constantly-reinforced fantasies about computers is that they will make good things happen all on their own. It's an attractive notion, but it's a fantasy. If good things are to happen, people will be required.

Oh so very true, but not just people, but skilled and knowledgeble people. How many of them are going to both want to and be allowed into school classrooms?

John Steinmetz Squeak enthusiast bassoonist, composer

...

I am hoping this message will not make a persona non grata on the Squeakdev list, or make me go squeaking back to my little lurker hole in the wall ... but as a competent programmer in many languages (and around Squeak since *before* 2.7), I nonetheless feel the way R. O'Keefe does, *in spades*. And as for Rachel, cited in H. Hirzel's epigraph/email, she, like so many newbies to the squeaklist, appears to be long gone. I did begin, awhile ago, doing a kind of ethnography-of-disappearing-squeak-newbies, tracing their initial enthusiastic postings, the helpful replies (always, always including Ned Konz, bless you sir), the dreadfully high percentage of cases in which this initial enthusiasm would fade away ... but it was too depressing, and to what end?

One point to remember here is that it is extremely difficult for an expert in any subject to create really good documentation far a lay person about that subject. The expert assumes an unreasonable amount of background knowledge - the unwritten lore which has become so ingrained that it is second nature. He produces a book with lots of what I call 'transparent lines', the simple facts just get forgotton. Alternatively he falls into the trap of assuming that his reader is a totally witless fool with the intellect of a dumb five or six year old. Exaggeration hovering, I know, but there is a lot of truth there too.

...

I am not here to trash Squeak -- far from it! I have been around so long, on and off, because I truly do believe, on the one hand, that herein lies a potentially *great* environment for newbies to programming. As a teacher of teachers and an advocate of programming, this gets me very excited, as you can imagine. (And the record 2005 posts to squeak-dev in Feb 2003 was due in no small part to a sudden upsurge in the pedaogical consciousness of the list...also exciting...less so recently...) But I think that if the Squeak insiders really believe that "kids in fifth grade are able to master etoys" (A. Raab, 2/10/03) without one or more Squeak insiders hovering close by, they are sadly mistaken!

I beg to differ here, I have personally seen a ten year old, and two or three 12 year olds use the e-toys most effectively. The ten year old is an exceptional student, but the others appeared to be pretty normal children who made car races and cannons firing in a morning. ok. Squeak e-toys is not for the witless child, but any child old enough to have language skills and of normal intelligence can learn to think like a computer scientist using Squeak and the e-toys. It's just that not everybody wants to learn to think like a computer scientist, so they don't.

...

(This is similar to a problem a fellow named Papert had vis a vis the "learnability" of Logo in the late 70's - early 80's....)

That's all for the moment. imho what's really needed is a glossary or dictionary to the natural language you gurus have developed over the last twenty years while Smalltalk has been developing.

Please keep up the good work.

-- Sincerely etc. C. Sawtell.

On Thu, 13 Mar 2003 08:39, Jerry Balzano wrote:

...

...

...

But I think that if the Squeak insiders really believe that "kids in fifth grade are able to master etoys" (A. Raab, 2/10/03) without one or more Squeak insiders hovering close by, they are sadly mistaken!

I beg to differ here, I have personally seen a ten year old, and two or three 12 year olds use the e-toys most effectively. The ten year old is an exceptional student, but the others appeared to be pretty normal children who made car races and cannons firing in a morning. ok. Squeak e-toys is not for the witless child, but any child old enough to have language skills and of normal intelligence can learn to think like a computer scientist using Squeak and the e-toys. It's just that not everybody wants to learn to think like a computer scientist, so they don't.

Well, Christopher, I certainly accept your report as the "data" it is, and I'm certainly impressed by it. The cannons firing, in particular, seem pretty far removed from anything I've seen in "tutorials" (demonstrating "far transfer" as they say), and I wonder if you'd be willing to share them with me or with other interested parties.

No, I'm sorry I can't share the cannon firing range exercise because it was done last year, and has long since tootled off to the bit-bucket in the sky. Anyway you would have probably been offended by it as it poked serious fun at the whole American ethos. That's why I didn't post it off to one of the Squeakland ftp archives at the time.

There are always exceptions to any (over)generalization of the sort I made, although I'm not quite ready to back completely off it.

I dont think you should feel that you have to back off your opinions, they are yours and you have every right to express them. Besides they do have that certain ring of truth about them you know.

One question I have is, what is the 12 year old doing with etoys now?

Not much, he's gone on to make animations and movies using more sophisticated tools. Seriously, this young fellow is going to be a big part of, if not a leader in, the Tinsel-Town industry. Peter Jackson you have competition.

(Actually I have other questions but first I wanted to see if you were interested in having a discussion about this at all.)

Chat away, but please note that I'm by no means an expert in all this squeaking stuff. I too have found the learning curve a cliff-face, but I'm quite certain that the view from the top is wonderous, so will plug away at it.

-- Sincerely etc., Christopher Sawtell

Kim Rose wrote:

Hi, Christopher -

Thanks for your comments -- It's a small comment in a way, but, I should point out that both the Squeak and Squeakland websites are ".orgs" not ".coms". This was done for explicit reasons and *should* inform visitors that we are not a commerical site or product driven.

Although we *always* give the .org reference, there is a domain squeakland.com that points to the same server. This was mainly meant as a convenience for people who often see .org and type .com.

No good deed goes unpunished...

Michael