Caroline,

Here is a Etoys Minute http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMDYf3_uovk video showing how to animate a mouth. FYI, I created the mouth images with the polygon tool (if you shift click on a polygon, you can see its "handles") the circles in the handle let you move vertices and if you click on a green triangle you can add a vertice. From the menu in the polygon's Halo you can set the lines to curved.

The project "The Walkershttp://squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7698" by P. A. Dreyfuss shows a great example of what you can do animating polygons. Note: this project uses some extra code in the polygon object, but it can be done in Etoys by simply placing each "frame" in a holder and animating that way. The advantage of using holders IMO is that the kids can see what's happening more easily.

Also you may want to check "Morphinghttp://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7112" by Kazuhiro Abe. I think kids will like this and at the appropriate time, with the appropriate guidance they could even write the morphing script themselves. But for now, they could simply re-use the script to create cool effects.

Stephen

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 10:25 PM, Caroline Meeks caroline@solutiongrove.comwrote:

Thanks Thomas thats incredibly helpful and I'll try these out tomorrow.

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 10:22 PM, Steve Thomas sthomas1@gosargon.comwrote:

...

Caroline,

Your students asked:

Etoys questions include:

1. How do we make a mouth that moves?

When you first open Etoys click on the "Gallery of Projects" then in the second row, first item from the left is a "Bouncing Ball Animation" basically it behaves like flip animation (where you draw the different positions on the edge of each piece of paper and flip through the pages to animate). Have the kids make different drawings of the mouth and place each one in a Holder. Then open the Holder's viewer go to the collections category and you can iterate through the items in the Holder and set the Mouth graphic to the "Holder's player at cursor graphic" To get the "Holder's player at cursor graphic" tile you need to click on the

• How do you control the placement of a speech/thought bubble. One girl made a very large heart with a face and the speech bubble appeared right at the top, it would look much better if it were over on the side and closer to the mouth. But I don’t see how to control how it is positioned.

Unfortunately you can not control the placement. What you could do is grab an image of the speech bubble and move the grabbed image to a different spot.

• How do you make moving eyes (from the object catalog)part of an object so when you move the object with a script the eyes move too?

If you place the eyes on top of the object you want to embed them in, then get the halo for the eye and click on the menu icon (top row, second from left), then select "embed" and choose the name of the object you want to embed them in. OR get the Halo of the item to which you want to add eyes then from the menu icon enure "accept drops" is checked. Now anything you place on that object will be embedded in it. NOTE: you may want to turn off "accept drops" once done, also if you move an object (using the move icon, instead of the pick up icon from the Halo, it will not embed).

• How do I control when a speech bubble appears and disappears. I seemed to be able to get it to appear fairly easily with the various options in the script but it then seemed to disappear again immediately.

Hmmm, can you share an actual project when this happens? Usually to get a speech bubble to disappear I use the "stop saying or thinking" tile. not sure why it would disappear otherwise.

I'll try and post an Etoys minute some time tomorrow night to show how these things can be done.

Stephen

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 9:46 PM, Caroline Meeks < caroline@solutiongrove.com> wrote:

...

Report is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z2wFRkZPOxKpREA6sV1-XVdxjm7bC9jP50KWkdL6...

We are working in a computer lab in a housing project in Somerville run by the Haitain Coalition of Somerville. We are using etoys to start with to help support collaboration between Waveplace and the Somerville Haitian Coalition. The students did very impressive work for the first day.

We are using E-toys on a USB stick that works on both PC and Linux and hopefully mac in a day or two. The goal is to have it also automatically backup to dropbox. This currently works on XP, hopefully ubuntu will be next.

We could use help from E-toys users. I have a bunch of how do I do this in E-toys questions in the report.

We could use help in writing the backup script for ubuntu.

Check out the report. It has nice screen shots. :)

Thanks, Caroline

-- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove Caroline@SolutionGrove.com

617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax

---

IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep

-- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove Caroline@SolutionGrove.com

617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax