Well, I have been using Squeak Etoys for two years in my high school classes as a means to create physical simulations, presentations, and games. I like Etoys as an initiation to object oriented programming however, at times students students become overwhelmed with Etoys. If this happens frequently within a specific class of students, I have them use "Scratch", available at scratch.mit.edu . "Scratch" is a gentler approach to programming than Etoys yet lacks some of the advanced functionality. Next year I may start everyone in "Scratch" before moving on to Etoys. The more advanced students have shown some success in creating with the latest Full Squeak image without using Etoys. I am however, limited in my own abilities to help the advanced students. I have done a few tutorials with Tweak yet lack enough understanding to use it in class. I feel that Croquet will be a great option for my classes, but I continuously receive callout errors when the program tries to access the OpenGL library which I know is installed. I think it's important for the students to see growing levels of sophistication built on the same basic virtual machine going from Scratch to Etoys to Squeak to Smalltalk.
If you have particular lessons or project goals you wish to share, I can respond with appropriate detail for what it's worth.
Best Wishes, Eric
On 4/3/07, Kim Rose kim.rose@vpri.org wrote:
Perhaps some of you who have gone through a similiar process would like to answer this query?
From: Alwyn Ng alwyn@splashwurks.com X-Mailer: The Bat! (v3.80.06) Professional Reply-To: Alwyn Ng alwyn@splashwurks.com Organization: Splashwurks InfoTech X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Message-ID: 259746180.20070330112541@splashwurks.com To: info@squeakland.org Subject: Questions regarding Squeak MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Hi,
I have a question regarding Squeak: In terms of features, capabilities and what kids can learn/gain from using it, how is Squeak different from a game development software for kids? I am looking at conducting courses for kids from age 7 to 12 and I am considering purchasing licenses for a game development software for kids until I chanced upon squeakland.org.
Thanks in advance.
Best regards,
Alwyn Ng (Mr) Manager, InfoTech Splashwurks Mobile: 8118-5453 Office: 6749-1948 Fax : 6749-2520 Email: alwyn@splashwurks.com
Squeakland mailing list Squeakland@squeakland.org http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
squeakland@lists.squeakfoundation.org