Ok! I will wade in on this one. Erik, I have been working with 3rd and 4th graders in at Orchard School in Indianapolis with Squeak for the past 6 months and have some thoughts for you.

First, I think you are stuck by a more traditional definition of a teacher's role in the instruction of students when using technology and especially Squeak. I have found that neither I nor the children really need much in the way of tutorials when we approach solving problems together interactively with Squeak. Kim's book is very helpful but not essential. Try to look at this less about teaching programming and use it more as a problem solving tool for a variety of situations in science and mathematics. My students have created some amazing solutions to "child" problems in science and math using the software.

I actually know very little about squeak and find that I am better at providing science and math problems (which can come from a traditional currcululum) to solve and then letting teams of children work through the solution. Which goes to the heart of my second point which is allowing them to work collaboratively at first to learn Squeak.

Finally, my approach with my 120 3rd and 4th graders must be correct since, via word of mouth between students and parents, the entire middle school, grades 5 through 8, now want me to teach Squeak to them. I have begun that process with the 6th grade and have found that children have an amazing capacity to solve their own problems, even those that require discovery. Personally, I hope we never get too slick with the projects and documentation that we lose this wonderful element of discovery and invention. I believe the entire premise behind etoys was allowing children to create their own knowledge and for teachers to guide and facilitate this process rather than directly instruct students.

I hope this helps.

Mark

On Mar 23, 2005, at 8:51 AM, Erik Nauman wrote:

I think the ideal would be something like your list below but a little more fleshed out for the classroom teacher audience. With more ideas accompanied with the specific "how tos" it would be less time-consuming for teachers, even those with plenty of tech (but minimal programming) experience like myself, to go beyond the few tutorials offered on squeakland. With more scaffolding more teachers would be able to push their students beyond simple variations of the basics like your son experienced at school. Another issue for me is that I tend to shy away from using tutorials with my students (5-7th grade) because I want them to be able to use their object-oriented experience to process content they are learning in other disciplines. So I have to come up with the content and "how to" myself. If you could post your own projects and solutions to squeakland I think it would be invaluable, even the complex projects you're working on as I think the squeak community is enormously varied in programming experience.

My question is can the current procedure on squeakland for submitting and posting projects on the kids play section of the site include accompanying tutorials? I think this would help lower the grade of the squeak learning curve for all users. Thanks, Erik Nauman Middle School Technology Coordinator The Hewitt School 212-994-2610

-----Original Message----- From: squeakland-bounces@squeakland.org [mailto:squeakland-bounces@squeakland.org] On Behalf Of Kevin Lawrence Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2005 7:46 PM To: squeakland@squeakland.org Subject: [Squeakland] EToys Experience Report

Something like this

1. Drive a Car around a track HINT : follow the excellent tutorial

2. Salmon navigation HINT : draw the river as a gradient HINT : Watch the saturationUnder as you move your salmon around the

river HINT : store the previous saturation in a variable

3. Bouncing Basketballs HINT : add the acceleration to the forwardBy every tick

.....

14. Star-eating Snake

HINT : Use the 'copy' message to gorw an extra body segment

...

27. Prisoner's Dilemma

HINT : Store the history in a linked list

.....

38. Kepler's Law

HINT : Think of a player as a vector

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