None of the limitations in etoys have *any* effect at all on really high quality projects by 10 and 11 year olds. That's who we wanted to test with over 3 years and (a) really good results happened, and (b) only about a third of the stuff we came up with easily covered a whole school year -- so there is plenty more that can be done.

I think one problem here is that you, like many adults, really want the next version of Hypercard with lots of features and wide range. This is good. That's what we want to do also, and we have been working on this for a few years. But this is not what etoys are about, as I've said many times over on this list. Etoys are an experimental authoring environment for kids around the age of 5th grade, done solely to allow us to test a bunch of ideas that seemed fruitful and needed testing. We made the work open source to attract potential colleagues, not to be a vendor (Squeak and etoys are not products, we are a nonprofit public benefit corporation operating on a shoestring for the public good, etc.)

Forgive me for saying this, but there's a certain amount of special pleading and rhetoric in your recent remarks. At one point you're using LOGO as "something that can't easily be learned", at another point you're invoking Seymour against BASIC. Neither of these have much to do with etoys -- in part because neither has a powerful dynamic object system with automatic graphical update. They simply aren't comparable and shouldn't be compared. The real heart of the matter is that children with pretty minimal help can do a wide range of projects that are engaging and empowering to them and that we think are intellectually interesting in the context of "real education".

The one place I agree with you is that "a new thing like Hypercard" (with even wider scope and higher ceilings) is what is eventually needed. But until that comes, a fabulous range of ideas can be pretty easily explored with children using etoys. (I.e. you shouldn't wait for the "76 Trombones" before you start a music program in a school. The children can sing and make instruments and a musical adult can bring them to very above threshold musical experiences with just that.)

Cheers,

Alan

At 9:56 AM -0800 3/13/03, Jerry Balzano wrote:

[Alan Kay, 3/11]

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So the people who have been very successful at etoys are those that are comfortable with any limited palette they are given. This has to be widened before we can declare etoys to be a real release.

[Dean Swan, 3/11 (later)

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You know, this could also be interpreted as a feature rather than a limitation. It's been my experience that constrained resource environments encourage "better" design.

Dean -

I guess I have to weigh in on the side of those who would want a wider palette of resources. Interestingly, the smaller number of primitive commands in BASIC vs LOGO back in the 70's was used as an argument for BASIC (e.g. "BASIC is easier because there are fewer commands to learn"); in fact, your comment reminded me of a rebuttal of this argument provided in "Mindstorms" which I quote here:

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An example of BASIC ideology is the argument that BASIC is easy to learn because it has a very small vocabulary. The surface validity of the argument is immediately called into question if we apply it to the context of how children learn natural languages. Imagine a suggestion that we invent a special language to help children learn to speak. This language would have a small vocabulary of just fifty words, but fifty words so well chosen that all ideas could be expressed using them. Would this language be easier to learn? Perhaps the vocabulary might be easy to learn, but the use of the vocabulary to express what one wanted to say would be so contorted that only the most motivated and brilliant children would learn to say more than "hi". This is close to the situation with BASIC. Its small vocabulary can be learned quickly enough. But using it is a different matter. Programs in BASIC acquire so labyrinthine a structure that in fact only the most motivated and brilliant ("mathematical") children do learn to use it for more than trivial ends. (Mindstorms, p. 35)

Let me, however, add the following provisos: (a) The "minimalist" exercise of "making do" with an artificially reduced set of resources to accomplish particular (selected) tasks can be quite valuable and satisfying, even if it is not something you would wish (esp on novices!) as a constant state of affairs.

(b) Access to the relatively large set of resources should be controlled or at least managed so as not to overwhelm novices, and there are a number of ways to go about this. HyperCard's five "user levels" constituted an interesting attempt at this "shielding" of beginners from unwanted resources, although I'm still not sure what I think of how well it worked. And etoys does have its language resources organized into panes, but here too I keep thinking a better way is on the tip of our collective tongues.

	- Jerry

P.S. I know I am invoking Papert a lot in my postings, but I am trying both to celebrate his insights and take proper warning from (what I believe to have been) his mistakes. Not to confuse necessary and sufficient conditions, I am nonetheless hoping that we Squeakers, by being more aware of history (of both events and ideas), won't be doomed to repeat it.

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