Hi Hilaire, I looked at the png of the die, dot in table, and fraction box and wonder, are they objects like the polygon with a dedicated set of tiles or a halo menu of options? The label Artifacts is confusing me; in schools here the label artifacts can mean educational materials used for assessment or, do you mean ready-to-use objects?
The Object Catalog and Supplies have similar things. Will DrGeo be a new tab in the Object Catalog? Do you propose another new category called Artifacts in the Object Catalog and then do you plan to add many objects to the next release of Etoys? Will they all be of special interest to math teachers and/or science teachers and at what grade levels? Do you know the USEIT adaptations of Etoys in use at the University of North Carolina Wilmington? The UNCW adaptations are for middle and high school science teachers. Are these similar to your ideas? Would they fit your category of Artifacts?
I am growing more uncertain about what Etoys will become if many specialized objects are added. To be useful, some of these objects require more knowledge in math and science. For example, the particles are amazing and whenever I show them to science teachers they are a wonderful example of using Etoys to explore ideas in physics. They are however, sophisticated and difficult for students to use without instruction. They are not intuitive unless you are already know physics. My elementary students click on them in the Object Catalog and then are at a loss, they have neither the science knowledge nor the programming skills to use them.
Are the teachers you know using Etoys for math instruction? The microcosm of the school where I work has not shown any interest in using Etoys to teach math even though the teachers are always impressed with the math students use to make projects. The teachers are more concerned with following a rigid curriculum that pre-tests, introduces concepts, post-tests, bench-marks, and quarterly assesses. And all of that instruction/assessment is, of course, focused toward the standardized tests given in March. Their curriculum is too large, time is too short, and each concept and skill is given too little time to mature. But, that is a problem for the math establishment and one of the reasons I like Etoys is that it is so much more open ended and so much less prescriptive and so much outside of the whole assessment environment that is consuming education in the US today.
The god of assessment has always had clay feet and Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010) gives me hope that we will see less emphasis on multiple-choice-single-right-answer-learning. I would urge that we (Etoys) not spend very much time developing subject area electronic worksheets and mechanisms that count right/wrong answers and keystroke attempts to be part of the software. Book publishers routinely provide such materials that are specific, sequenced, and aligned and, from what I can see, teachers are hard pressed to use everything that is already available. If new artifacts are being considered as potential objects for the next release of Etoys, we should start talking about our vision for Etoys and what the core of it will be.
Etoys thrives on mathematics and, on imagination, but to put too much emphasis on teaching a core curriculum of math or science will limit the other uses and imagination. My students use math in their projects and are indeed learning concepts at a deep level but they are not learning the math curriculum for their grade. For example, my 2nd-5th grade students routinely use test statements, create variables, and add random number generator tiles to projects. They use xy coordinates fluently because they want to control locations of objects and to position objects with reset scripts. Most of the Races and Mazes in EtoysIllinois were made by elementary students and show these kinds of applications of learning.
Unfortunately, standardized assessments do not assess for this kind of learning and certainly not in elementary grades in dynamic environments. My sense is that subject area teachers everywhere are bound by local, state, and national requirements. My hope is that Etoys provides collections of projects that show examples for deep learning and that as schools react to the growing need for more and more people who can program, who can use the language of the computer to express ideas, who are creative and, who will thrive in the future or, in careers that use programming skills, that Etoys would be in a position to be adopted as the tool for teaching programming in K-12 schools.
Etoys is certainly powerful enough to grow up with children from elementary to high school . . . without a doubt. It was one of the reasons I first considered Etoys, that is, it can not be outgrown or worn out in a year or two.
I have written materials that show how easy it is to integrate Etoys into core curriculum but in every case I find that the core curriculum is already full, too full, and very well planned by curriculum specialists and that there is no room for Etoys in their view of their subject. I said this at a MSTE Board of Advisors meeting a year ago and Chip Bruce said: if there was no room at the table we should make our own table. It seems to me, Etoys could make its own table and in doing so raise the rather low expectations for what is currently passing as computer literacy. Keyboarding and using the internet are at a much lower level than the most basic Etoys project.
The K-12 cs/programming discipline is very new and that is good for us. It is an opportunity for us to define what should be. If we can provide a cogent set of projects that develop good habits of mind, creative, and logical thinking we might find Etoys adopted by schools who are looking ahead for their students' futures. I would much prefer that we build our own table rather than try to squeeze Etoys as one more topic into other disciplines already full curricula.
My hope is that schools will see the need for specialists to teach the subject of programming, just as music and art specialists focus on providing an excellent general education for all. Wouldn't it be grand if children routinely went to the computer lab to learn Etoys, just as they go to the music room to learn music. You may know, I was a music teacher and taught music to everyone in the school every year. It was not a course with preliminary requirements of talent, IQ, skill, interest or, potential for becoming a professional musician. Music is part of what it means to be educated. If we can align with that kind of belief, that knowing how to program, how to use the computer creatively to express ideas rather than being passive users or used by it, then we will have achieved something of value.
I know this note is too long but I hope we can start talking about some of these ideas. Regards, Kathleen
---- Original message ----
Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 09:22:40 +0200 From: Hilaire Fernandes hilaire.fernandes@edu.ge.ch Subject: [squeakland] Artifacts in ObjectCatalog To: "squeakland.org mailing list" squeakland@squeakland.org
Dear all,
In the latest Artifacts package at (http://www.squeaksource.com/LearningArtifacts) I added a category Artifacts as a place holder for the artifacts. See the attached screenshot.
I also added an Artifact DotInTable to represent collection of token in row and column. It can be used to represent graphically the multiplication of two integers. The column, row and dot color are all Etoys scriptable. Again as an artifact, teacher can invent new way to use it and to combine it with other artifacts for a teaching purpose.
By the way, I tried these artifacts with Squeak 4.1 and it works perfectly well from there, and the Squeak environment is more pleasant to write Smalltlak code.
I will continue to add artifacts to this package.
Hilaire
-- http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire ________________ ArtifactsObjectCatalog.png (16k bytes) ________________ _______________________________________________ squeakland mailing list squeakland@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
Hello Kathleen,
I am not sure what you are trying to tell me, and I don't know much about the US curriculum, I am teaching math and computer science in junior high school at Geneva. In our computer science courses, Logo, Etoys, Scratch are used in school. Personally I use both Etoys and Scratch to teach programming.
Regarding artifacts the term I am using should be understood under the perspective of the theory of activity, and it has nothing to do with assessment or ready to use teaching material.
About the artifacts I am writing in Etoys: if you consider token and grid, their intrinsic quality does not bring any teaching value, the teaching value is in the way the teacher uses it with his students. So my artifacts are the same, they are just simple facilitators, and of course they are objects like the polygon, they come with a set of tiles. Otherwise they will be useless. My very personal feeling is Etoys miss such artifacts. Too many time I saw teachers seeing amazing things but feeling at the same time it is out of reach for them. Artifact are just filling a gap in Etoys.
Of course, we should have hundred of artifacts to cover many teaching domain.
In some way, you could see Artifacts as distilled substance from smart Etoys project. Steve clearly articulated it in a previous email.
Regarding the integration of DrGeo, so far it appears in Tools and Graphic categories in the Object Catalog. We have not discussed about its integration, and any idea are welcome
Regarding the integration of the artifacts in the next release of Etoys, I am not deciding, I just try to bring some fresh idea to discuss with. So far the artifacts I am writting are math oriented, as a mater of personal taste and knowledge. We may want more for other domain, but I don't know the artifacts teachers in music, art, litterature, xp sciences may want to use. We could distilled artifacts from references documentation.
Yes, I read USEIT adaptations of Etoys. From what I saw, my artifacts are at a lower pedagogical level (I may say neutral pedagogically). May be distilled artifact may come out of these projects, and reprogrammed in Smalltalk for scalability.
I don't know teacher using Etoys for math instruction. More in robotic or CS.
Regarding the place Etoys can take in curriculum, my feeling is we could try to make things change. If we can shift the use of some well know author software (JC, HP) to Etoys, we may be successful in both improving the quality of the media provided to the student and in Etoys acknowledgment.
Hilaire
kharness@illinois.edu a écrit :
Hi Hilaire, I looked at the png of the die, dot in table, and fraction box and wonder, are they objects like the polygon with a dedicated set of tiles or a halo menu of options? The label Artifacts is confusing me; in schools here the label artifacts can mean educational materials used for assessment or, do you mean ready-to-use objects?
The Object Catalog and Supplies have similar things. Will DrGeo be a new tab in the Object Catalog? Do you propose another new category called Artifacts in the Object Catalog and then do you plan to add many objects to the next release of Etoys? Will they all be of special interest to math teachers and/or science teachers and at what grade levels? Do you know the USEIT adaptations of Etoys in use at the University of North Carolina Wilmington? The UNCW adaptations are for middle and high school science teachers. Are these similar to your ideas? Would they fit your category of Artifacts?
I am growing more uncertain about what Etoys will become if many specialized objects are added. To be useful, some of these objects require more knowledge in math and science. For example, the particles are amazing and whenever I show them to science teachers they are a wonderful example of using Etoys to explore ideas in physics. They are however, sophisticated and difficult for students to use without instruction. They are not intuitive unless you are already know physics. My elementary students click on them in the Object Catalog and then are at a loss, they have neither the science knowledge nor the programming skills to use them.
Are the teachers you know using Etoys for math instruction? The microcosm of the school where I work has not shown any interest in using Etoys to teach math even though the teachers are always impressed with the math students use to make projects. The teachers are more concerned with following a rigid curriculum that pre-tests, introduces concepts, post-tests, bench-marks, and quarterly assesses. And all of that instruction/assessment is, of course, focused toward the standardized tests given in March. Their curriculum is too large, time is too short, and each concept and skill is given too little time to mature. But, that is a problem for the math establishment and one of the reasons I like Etoys is that it is so much more open ended and so much less prescriptive and so much outside of the whole assessment environment that is consuming education in the US today.
The god of assessment has always had clay feet and Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010) gives me hope that we will see less emphasis on multiple-choice-single-right-answer-learning. I would urge that we (Etoys) not spend very much time developing subject area electronic worksheets and mechanisms that count right/wrong answers and keystroke attempts to be part of the software. Book publishers routinely provide such materials that are specific, sequenced, and aligned and, from what I can see, teachers are hard pressed to use everything that is already available. If new artifacts are being considered as potential objects for the next release of Etoys, we should start talking about our vision for Etoys and what the core of it will be.
Etoys thrives on mathematics and, on imagination, but to put too much emphasis on teaching a core curriculum of math or science will limit the other uses and imagination. My students use math in their projects and are indeed learning concepts at a deep level but they are not learning the math curriculum for their grade. For example, my 2nd-5th grade students routinely use test statements, create variables, and add random number generator tiles to projects. They use xy coordinates fluently because they want to control locations of objects and to position objects with reset scripts. Most of the Races and Mazes in EtoysIllinois were made by elementary students and show these kinds of applications of learning.
Unfortunately, standardized assessments do not assess for this kind of learning and certainly not in elementary grades in dynamic environments. My sense is that subject area teachers everywhere are bound by local, state, and national requirements. My hope is that Etoys provides collections of projects that show examples for deep learning and that as schools react to the growing need for more and more people who can program, who can use the language of the computer to express ideas, who are creative and, who will thrive in the future or, in careers that use programming skills, that Etoys would be in a position to be adopted as the tool for teaching programming in K-12 schools.
Etoys is certainly powerful enough to grow up with children from elementary to high school . . . without a doubt. It was one of the reasons I first considered Etoys, that is, it can not be outgrown or worn out in a year or two.
I have written materials that show how easy it is to integrate Etoys into core curriculum but in every case I find that the core curriculum is already full, too full, and very well planned by curriculum specialists and that there is no room for Etoys in their view of their subject. I said this at a MSTE Board of Advisors meeting a year ago and Chip Bruce said: if there was no room at the table we should make our own table. It seems to me, Etoys could make its own table and in doing so raise the rather low expectations for what is currently passing as computer literacy. Keyboarding and using the internet are at a much lower level than the most basic Etoys project.
The K-12 cs/programming discipline is very new and that is good for us. It is an opportunity for us to define what should be. If we can provide a cogent set of projects that develop good habits of mind, creative, and logical thinking we might find Etoys adopted by schools who are looking ahead for their students' futures. I would much prefer that we build our own table rather than try to squeeze Etoys as one more topic into other disciplines already full curricula.
My hope is that schools will see the need for specialists to teach the subject of programming, just as music and art specialists focus on providing an excellent general education for all. Wouldn't it be grand if children routinely went to the computer lab to learn Etoys, just as they go to the music room to learn music. You may know, I was a music teacher and taught music to everyone in the school every year. It was not a course with preliminary requirements of talent, IQ, skill, interest or, potential for becoming a professional musician. Music is part of what it means to be educated. If we can align with that kind of belief, that knowing how to program, how to use the computer creatively to express ideas rather than being passive users or used by it, then we will have achieved something of value.
I know this note is too long but I hope we can start talking about some of these ideas. Regards, Kathleen
---- Original message ----
Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 09:22:40 +0200 From: Hilaire Fernandes hilaire.fernandes@edu.ge.ch Subject: [squeakland] Artifacts in ObjectCatalog To: "squeakland.org mailing list" squeakland@squeakland.org
Dear all,
In the latest Artifacts package at (http://www.squeaksource.com/LearningArtifacts) I added a category Artifacts as a place holder for the artifacts. See the attached screenshot.
I also added an Artifact DotInTable to represent collection of token in row and column. It can be used to represent graphically the multiplication of two integers. The column, row and dot color are all Etoys scriptable. Again as an artifact, teacher can invent new way to use it and to combine it with other artifacts for a teaching purpose.
By the way, I tried these artifacts with Squeak 4.1 and it works perfectly well from there, and the Squeak environment is more pleasant to write Smalltlak code.
I will continue to add artifacts to this package.
Hilaire
-- http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire ________________ ArtifactsObjectCatalog.png (16k bytes) ________________ _______________________________________________ squeakland mailing list squeakland@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
On Saturday, May 29, 2010 09:15:54 pm kharness@illinois.edu wrote:
The teachers are more concerned with following a rigid curriculum that pre-tests, introduces concepts, post-tests, bench-marks, and quarterly assesses. And all of that instruction/assessment is, of course, focused toward the standardized tests given in March. Their curriculum is too large, time is too short, and each concept and skill is given too little time to mature. But, that is a problem for the math establishment and one of the reasons I like Etoys is that it is so much more open ended and so much less prescriptive and so much outside of the whole assessment environment that is consuming education in the US today.
These beliefs are widely prevalent in my locality too but I have met a few teachers who refuse to subscribe to these beliefs. They are quite clear that most students can be taught to qualify in sixty days provided they are motivated. So they spend the initial weeks in motivating them and then bring in the curriculum. Board officials don't dare :-) take a performing teacher to task. Questions arise only when students don't make the grade.
In around 110 village public schools in my locality, Etoys is used as a motivator but not integrated into the curriculum (yet!). There are no canned projects illustrating lessons. Teachers reported that kids who used Etoys are easier to teach than other kids. In one cluster, they even had their own mini- conference on Etoys [1] where teachers watched student present their projects. Appropriation has been slow but steady.
[1] http://sikshana.blogspot.com/2009/12/students-conference-in-halasuru- school.html
Subbu
Folks,
I had no idea the term Artifact was so loaded. So let me expand a bit on what I am thinking about, which is somewhat different from what I fear is being perceived:
First what I do not mean:
- another method to help kids learn sterile facts and mindless disconnected procedures - something to be used in drill and kill worksheets - although I fear there is nothing that can be done to prevent that use in some cases, that should not stop their use for better purposes - while most worksheets I have seen are "mind numbing" at the risk of starting another "conversation" I have seen and used some very good ones (ex: Miquon) - Something to be used for pure assessment purposes - Pre-constructed answers so kids don't have to think - gimmicks to "make math interesting" or "cutesy"
What I am trying to create:
- A way to "present concepts first" without the formulas or notation - something that provides concrete metaphors to help kids access powerful ideas - something kids can play with to explore ideas - in the case of Cuisenaire Rods and GeoBoards mathematical ones, yet I can envision their uses in other areas - something that can be used by a student to help explore and explain their ideas - something that can be used by a teacher to pose questions and problems for the kids - and yes, something that can help teachers assess children's understanding in an efficient and effective way and in certain cases provide feedback because we can't "put Seymour in the box" or a teacher with subject matter expertise in all areas (especially hard for elementary teachers and teachers in third world countries where in some, but not all cases, they are learning along with the students.)
"The Tools to think with/teach with/learn with" are not end goals and in fact are in my mind merely first steps in providing a set of tools for learning. These Tools also need appropriate lesson plans or what I prefer to think of as scripts for improvisation.
The "Tools to teach with" are things I can use to pose problems, assess understanding and challenge students existing mental models.
Some examples are the virtual cuisinaire rods and geo-boards.
Hopefully what I am thinking about will become clearer when I produce some more examples and perhaps video of how I see them being used.
As far as whether they should be included in the Etoys Object Catalog. At this point I think not.
Etoys (as near as I can figure) is built upon doing everything from first principles, which is part of its power and beauty. That said I think we need to solve the problem that it can take quite a while and not everyone is capable of building things from first principles.
Some higher levels of domain specific abstractions are useful and I believe necessary. Also, Hilaire makes a good point that to make things scalable these would need to be done in smalltalk.
I have other comments on Kathleen and Lockhardt's excellent points, but I will spare you (for now ;) I need more time to think about them.
Stephen
On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 11:45 AM, kharness@illinois.edu wrote:
Hi Hilaire, I looked at the png of the die, dot in table, and fraction box and wonder, are they objects like the polygon with a dedicated set of tiles or a halo menu of options? The label Artifacts is confusing me; in schools here the label artifacts can mean educational materials used for assessment or, do you mean ready-to-use objects?
The Object Catalog and Supplies have similar things. Will DrGeo be a new tab in the Object Catalog? Do you propose another new category called Artifacts in the Object Catalog and then do you plan to add many objects to the next release of Etoys? Will they all be of special interest to math teachers and/or science teachers and at what grade levels? Do you know the USEIT adaptations of Etoys in use at the University of North Carolina Wilmington? The UNCW adaptations are for middle and high school science teachers. Are these similar to your ideas? Would they fit your category of Artifacts?
I am growing more uncertain about what Etoys will become if many specialized objects are added. To be useful, some of these objects require more knowledge in math and science. For example, the particles are amazing and whenever I show them to science teachers they are a wonderful example of using Etoys to explore ideas in physics. They are however, sophisticated and difficult for students to use without instruction. They are not intuitive unless you are already know physics. My elementary students click on them in the Object Catalog and then are at a loss, they have neither the science knowledge nor the programming skills to use them.
Are the teachers you know using Etoys for math instruction? The microcosm of the school where I work has not shown any interest in using Etoys to teach math even though the teachers are always impressed with the math students use to make projects. The teachers are more concerned with following a rigid curriculum that pre-tests, introduces concepts, post-tests, bench-marks, and quarterly assesses. And all of that instruction/assessment is, of course, focused toward the standardized tests given in March. Their curriculum is too large, time is too short, and each concept and skill is given too little time to mature. But, that is a problem for the math establishment and one of the reasons I like Etoys is that it is so much more open ended and so much less prescriptive and so much outside of the whole assessment environment that is consuming education in the US today.
The god of assessment has always had clay feet and Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010) gives me hope that we will see less emphasis on multiple-choice-single-right-answer-learning. I would urge that we (Etoys) not spend very much time developing subject area electronic worksheets and mechanisms that count right/wrong answers and keystroke attempts to be part of the software. Book publishers routinely provide such materials that are specific, sequenced, and aligned and, from what I can see, teachers are hard pressed to use everything that is already available. If new artifacts are being considered as potential objects for the next release of Etoys, we should start talking about our vision for Etoys and what the core of it will be.
Etoys thrives on mathematics and, on imagination, but to put too much emphasis on teaching a core curriculum of math or science will limit the other uses and imagination. My students use math in their projects and are indeed learning concepts at a deep level but they are not learning the math curriculum for their grade. For example, my 2nd-5th grade students routinely use test statements, create variables, and add random number generator tiles to projects. They use xy coordinates fluently because they want to control locations of objects and to position objects with reset scripts. Most of the Races and Mazes in EtoysIllinois were made by elementary students and show these kinds of applications of learning.
Unfortunately, standardized assessments do not assess for this kind of learning and certainly not in elementary grades in dynamic environments. My sense is that subject area teachers everywhere are bound by local, state, and national requirements. My hope is that Etoys provides collections of projects that show examples for deep learning and that as schools react to the growing need for more and more people who can program, who can use the language of the computer to express ideas, who are creative and, who will thrive in the future or, in careers that use programming skills, that Etoys would be in a position to be adopted as the tool for teaching programming in K-12 schools.
Etoys is certainly powerful enough to grow up with children from elementary to high school . . . without a doubt. It was one of the reasons I first considered Etoys, that is, it can not be outgrown or worn out in a year or two.
I have written materials that show how easy it is to integrate Etoys into core curriculum but in every case I find that the core curriculum is already full, too full, and very well planned by curriculum specialists and that there is no room for Etoys in their view of their subject. I said this at a MSTE Board of Advisors meeting a year ago and Chip Bruce said: if there was no room at the table we should make our own table. It seems to me, Etoys could make its own table and in doing so raise the rather low expectations for what is currently passing as computer literacy. Keyboarding and using the internet are at a much lower level than the most basic Etoys project.
The K-12 cs/programming discipline is very new and that is good for us. It is an opportunity for us to define what should be. If we can provide a cogent set of projects that develop good habits of mind, creative, and logical thinking we might find Etoys adopted by schools who are looking ahead for their students' futures. I would much prefer that we build our own table rather than try to squeeze Etoys as one more topic into other disciplines already full curricula.
My hope is that schools will see the need for specialists to teach the subject of programming, just as music and art specialists focus on providing an excellent general education for all. Wouldn't it be grand if children routinely went to the computer lab to learn Etoys, just as they go to the music room to learn music. You may know, I was a music teacher and taught music to everyone in the school every year. It was not a course with preliminary requirements of talent, IQ, skill, interest or, potential for becoming a professional musician. Music is part of what it means to be educated. If we can align with that kind of belief, that knowing how to program, how to use the computer creatively to express ideas rather than being passive users or used by it, then we will have achieved something of value.
I know this note is too long but I hope we can start talking about some of these ideas. Regards, Kathleen
---- Original message ----
Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 09:22:40 +0200 From: Hilaire Fernandes hilaire.fernandes@edu.ge.ch Subject: [squeakland] Artifacts in ObjectCatalog To: "squeakland.org mailing list" squeakland@squeakland.org
Dear all,
In the latest Artifacts package at (http://www.squeaksource.com/LearningArtifacts) I added a category Artifacts as a place holder for the artifacts. See the attached screenshot.
I also added an Artifact DotInTable to represent collection of token in row and column. It can be used to represent graphically the multiplication of two integers. The column, row and dot color are all Etoys scriptable. Again as an artifact, teacher can invent new way to use it and to combine it with other artifacts for a teaching purpose.
By the way, I tried these artifacts with Squeak 4.1 and it works perfectly well from there, and the Squeak environment is more pleasant to write Smalltlak code.
I will continue to add artifacts to this package.
Hilaire
-- http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire ________________ ArtifactsObjectCatalog.png (16k bytes) ________________ _______________________________________________ squeakland mailing list squeakland@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
squeakland mailing list squeakland@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
Steve Thomas a écrit :
As far as whether they should be included in the Etoys Object Catalog. At this point I think not.
Etoys (as near as I can figure) is built upon doing everything from first principles, which is part of its power and beauty. That said I think we need to solve the problem that it can take quite a while and not everyone is capable of building things from first principles.
You can even wrote most people are not capable of building things from first principles. If we want Etoys to scale to a larger audiance, it is a way to go. Of course, it is not because we provide higher level artefact (in a way we found appropriate) we are closing the door.
Hilaire
Some higher levels of domain specific abstractions are useful and I believe necessary. Also, Hilaire makes a good point that to make things scalable these would need to be done in smalltalk.
Hilaire,
I agree that we need to provide higher level artifacts. I am just not sure that the object catalog is the best place to put them all, because I can see a large number of higher level artifacts that would be useful.
There have been a number of times where I created something from one project I wanted to include in another and until I discovered the "copy" and "paste" method to move things between projects I didn't have any good method. I still run into some problems with copying and pasting between projects where the scripts seem to break.
We need a way to make these artifacts available and discoverable and the object catalog is one way.* At this point* I just don't know what the best way to do that is.
Stephen
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 9:10 AM, Hilaire Fernandes < hilaire.fernandes@edu.ge.ch> wrote:
Steve Thomas a écrit :
As far as whether they should be included in the Etoys Object Catalog. At
this point I think not. Etoys (as near as I can figure) is built upon doing everything from first principles, which is part of its power and beauty. That said I think we need to solve the problem that it can take quite a while and not everyone is capable of building things from first principles.
You can even wrote most people are not capable of building things from first principles. If we want Etoys to scale to a larger audiance, it is a way to go. Of course, it is not because we provide higher level artefact (in a way we found appropriate) we are closing the door.
Hilaire
Some higher levels of domain specific abstractions are useful and I
believe necessary. Also, Hilaire makes a good point that to make things scalable these would need to be done in smalltalk.
On Thursday 03 Jun 2010 7:23:25 pm Steve Thomas wrote:
There have been a number of times where I created something from one project I wanted to include in another and until I discovered the "copy" and "paste" method to move things between projects I didn't have any good method.
For the record, flaps are global drawer for objects. Supplies bin is a flap. So you can just drag objects from current project into it, open another project and copy them.
Subbu
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 11:32 AM, K. K. Subramaniam kksubbu.ml@gmail.comwrote:
For the record, flaps are global drawer for objects. Supplies bin is a flap. So you can just drag objects from current project into it, open another project and copy them.
Subbu
The only problem with that is the things I drag into the supplies bin do not persist between restarts of Etoys. Also to be clear you are suggesting dragging into the Supplies bin.
The other flaps I create and add to a project do not remain visible when I open a new project. I have created flaps for sets of objects, such as a set of cuisenaire rods and a number line, then copied the flaps to other projects as well but I see the advantage of using the Supplies bin, thanks.
FYI, the problem I am trying to solve is how to re-use artifacts (which can be a collection of related objects, usually contained within a playfield to make copier easier) in other projects.
Perhaps we could have a method where they could be shared amongst kids, so they could "send" each other objects and/or publish and retrieve them from a repository.
Stephen
On 04.06.2010, at 19:17, Steve Thomas wrote:
The other flaps I create and add to a project do not remain visible when I open a new project.
In a flap's halo menu, you need to enable "shared by all projects".
Perhaps we could have a method where they could be shared amongst kids, so they could "send" each other objects and/or publish and retrieve them from a repository.
On the OLPC XO laptop you can send objects directly to another machine.
- Bert -
I remember I try this to share DrGeo canvas between several XO machine with this Etoys sharing facility, it was not working for me. I don't remember exactly why and what. So just try and see.
Hilaire
Bert Freudenberg a écrit :
On 04.06.2010, at 19:17, Steve Thomas wrote:
The other flaps I create and add to a project do not remain visible when I open a new project.
In a flap's halo menu, you need to enable "shared by all projects".
Perhaps we could have a method where they could be shared amongst kids, so they could "send" each other objects and/or publish and retrieve them from a repository.
On the OLPC XO laptop you can send objects directly to another machine.
- Bert -
squeakland mailing list squeakland@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
On Friday 04 Jun 2010 10:47:09 pm Steve Thomas wrote:
FYI, the problem I am trying to solve is how to re-use artifacts (which can be a collection of related objects, usually contained within a playfield to make copier easier) in other projects.
Collect all shared objects into a project (say Assets.pr) and share it with all kids. This requires an extra step of dropping the project after starting Etoys but you get the advantage of accumulating shared assets across all Etoys image upgrades.
FWIW .. Subbu
Hi all,
On 06/03/2010 06:10 AM, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
Steve Thomas a écrit :
As far as whether they should be included in the Etoys Object Catalog. At this point I think not. Etoys (as near as I can figure) is built upon doing everything from first principles, which is part of its power and beauty. That said I think we need to solve the problem that it can take quite a while and not everyone is capable of building things from first principles.
You can even wrote most people are not capable of building things from first principles. If we want Etoys to scale to a larger audiance, it is a way to go. Of course, it is not because we provide higher level artefact (in a way we found appropriate) we are closing the door.
Hilaire
About what Katlenn Hilaire and Steve are discussing, I think that we need a way to make Etoys grow with their audience. I used Scracth and Etoys to teach "Introduction to Informatics" with freshmen students in University and now I use them to teach some introductory concepts of object oriented programming to teachers who are making master studies on didactics with an emphasis on Information and Communication Technologies. So my students population is not primary children, but young students and seasoned teachers and thats why I have a concern with an environment that grow with the student. In my personal experience artifacts (in the sense that Hilaire is talking) are necesary. My first necessity of them came with my studies on collective problem solving and adding Bots Inc artifact (made by Ducasse) to Etoys was a major improvement in the learning experience. And I think that DrGeoII is also an improvement in a lot of contexts.
I think that Etoys/Squeak embodies much powerful ideas about what informatics should be, as powerful that is some kind of response about what you thought about computers before the very first encounter with Squeak. Computer as cognitive artifacts need to have a discourse about knowledge (an epistemology). For me these are some of the powerful ideas of Squeak:
* Self contained: Squeak has a discourse about itself. You can change Squeak from Squeak itself. I have seen this in other software like the tiddlywiki microwiki made in javascript, and the metaeditor Leo (Literate Editor with Outlines) made in python.
* Metamedium: This is where Squeak surely beats others. Is a way to think / create discourse about other digital media. In general the idea of creating discourse about digital is an effort you see in the Smalltalk/Squeak group since the beginning. Now it has incarnations in projects like COLA (Collaborative Object Lambda Architecture), but again you can see this in some way in Tiddlywiki (but their discourse is only about hipertext and hipermedia and they "delegate to the browser" most of the media part) and Leo in the sense that using a variant of Literate Programming you can organize a program in a way that fits your way of understanding / explaining, not only classes, objetcts, methods and so on. What I try to point is that Squeak is a place to think about other things including informatics and other scientific disciplines and science itself. The idea of using computers to represent/empower human thinking is also in hypermedia and literate programming, for example, and is possible to see in it a diverse intellectual tradition that includes thinkers like Kay, Engelbart, Nelson, Knuth. For me, if we want to make improvements on education we need to honor that tradition and make more explicit connections between this schools and proposals.
The comments of Katleen, Hilaire and Steve are rooted in a way to improve the learning experience (well we all comment on that in this list) and I think that we need to have a look about how computers are thought as cognitive artifacts that have a discourse about knowledge and look at several traditions. In that way we can use the ideas behind Squeak and others, even if we're not using Squeak (or others) directly. For example, as my teaching went from informatics to mathematics I started to try to inform (in the sense of giving form and sense) to my teaching practices from the ideas learned in the Squeak community and connect them with others, even if my tools where Computer Algebra Systems, Scientific word processors and Social Software, but this will be part of another mail... this one went too long and I'm taking a long detour of the initial discuss.
Cheers,
Offray
squeakland@lists.squeakfoundation.org
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Bert Freudenberg -
Hilaire Fernandes -
K. K. Subramaniam -
kharness＠illinois.edu -
Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas -
Steve Thomas