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Dear friends and colleagues,
Greetings from me, at 2:00 AM PST, having just returned yesterday
from a 10 day trip to Japan. Alan, Yoshiki, Roxanne Maloney and I
just completed a very successful 10 day trip to Tokyo and Kyoto. I
believe most of you know that last year, the Kyoto city schools
started a three year pilot to use Squeak in several schools. They
are starting with 2 elementary schools, 2 middle schools and 2 high
schools. Currently, the strongest participants are one elementary
school and one high school.
We met Thoru Yamamoto, the author/illustrator of "Play with Squeak"
(see this page and scroll
http://www.squeakland.org/sqmedia/books/squeakerbooks.html) I've
attached a picture of him here. His book has already sold over
6,000 copies in Japan! We are planning on translating his book into
English. We also have made arrangements for "Powerful ideas in the
Classroom" to be translated into Japanese so that it may be used as
part of the schools program there.
We visited Horikawa High School where students presented their
curriculum (in a Squeak-based presentation) and a few Etoys they had
created. I've attached 2 more pictures showing student sharing here.
The Etoy in the picture was created by a young lady to help people
learn about how Japanese live and their culture. Her butterfly is
animated and controlled with a joystick. As the butterfly is flown
around the house, messages are revealed to describe parts of the
room, such as the "tokonoma" or niche that holds the scroll and the
ikebana -- the flower arrangement. Visually, it is one of the most
beautiful etoys I've seen.
We'll return to Japan at the end of January for curriculum
development meetings and a more technical conference called "C5" -- a
Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through
Computing with not only contributors from Japan, but other parts of
Asia. We hope to have some of our Asian colleagues come to the next
U.S. SqueakFest in 2004.
We'll put more text and picutres on the Squeakland site soon. In the
meantime, I hope everyone is well and enjoying the fall. Please let
us know what you are up to and share your or your students' projects!
cheers,
Kim