I looked at this TED presentation today: http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_w...
He say there are a trillion hours of participatory value up for grabs.
We could do with some more people working on Etoys :-)
I also looked at these two web forum pages discussing programming for kids pages today but not much love for Etoys:
http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/169225.html http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/kgbzq/why_we_should_teach_our_k...
There seems to be a mismatch from we perceive as values and strong features of Etoys and what other people see. Why do we not get the ideas out? What makes is so hard ? Do people test Etoys and drop it ?
Karl
On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 10:44 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. jecel@merlintec.com wrote:
Alan Kay wrote:
[...] Then we handed Etoys over to the Squeak Foundation, and the version they put out online retains the classroom UI with flaps.
Actually, that would be the Squeakland Foundation. But in the Squeak Board at least Bert and I try to represent the interests of the Etoys (and Scratch) users.
One reason for Scratch's popularity is the restrictions they have made which upset some people in the OLPC community. Etoys, on the other hand, suffered from some of the problems that open source projects have - students and teacher become very upset when some project they have created won't load into a newer version of the system. Note that I am fully on the side of Etoys here, but we have to be aware of the costs.
It is interesting to me that Scratch's explict loops (compared to Etoys' clock driven scripts) don't seem to cause any difficulties for beginners nor for young children. That shows how important it is to test stuff rather than follow our intuitions.
What I would really like (in the sense that I am trying to get funding to pay a group of people to build) would be a system within Croquet/Cobalt that would start out like Scratch, then become more and more like Etoys as the programmer's skills improved with a smooth path all the way to the Smalltalk level.
Jens Mönig, the guy who did BYOB (Build Your Own Block extension of Scratch), also created Elements, which is a Scratch syntax for Smalltalk-80:
http://www.chirp.scratchr.org/blog/?p=24
So it is easy enough to see how far this approach can scale.
-- Jecel
squeakland mailing list squeakland@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
Perhaps programming is not for the mass, and it is not the target of Etoys, right? The unique value of Etoys is how you can connect different artefacts developed in different contexts, thanks to the tiles. Supplementary artefacts can be written in Smalltalk rock star, but this feature does not scale right now, the problem is not Smalltalk but more the lacking infrastructure around (internal and external to Etoys).
I am pretty sure at 100% that if Etoys came with huge libraries of such artefact, specialised for various domains, ready to use by educators, Etoys will have a tremendous impact both in the teaching communities and the educative content producers.
As long as Etoys does not take a more focused direction targeted to the professionals of the sector (the educators), it will remain where it is.
Hilaire
2011/9/15 karl ramberg karlramberg@gmail.com
I looked at this TED presentation today:
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_w...
He say there are a trillion hours of participatory value up for grabs.
We could do with some more people working on Etoys :-)
I also looked at these two web forum pages discussing programming for kids pages today but not much love for Etoys:
http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/169225.html
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/kgbzq/why_we_should_teach_our_k...
There seems to be a mismatch from we perceive as values and strong features of Etoys and what other people see. Why do we not get the ideas out? What makes is so hard ? Do people test Etoys and drop it ?
Karl
On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 10:44 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. jecel@merlintec.com wrote:
Alan Kay wrote:
[...] Then we handed Etoys over to the Squeak Foundation, and the version they put out online retains the classroom UI with flaps.
Actually, that would be the Squeakland Foundation. But in the Squeak Board at least Bert and I try to represent the interests of the Etoys (and Scratch) users.
One reason for Scratch's popularity is the restrictions they have made which upset some people in the OLPC community. Etoys, on the other hand, suffered from some of the problems that open source projects have - students and teacher become very upset when some project they have created won't load into a newer version of the system. Note that I am fully on the side of Etoys here, but we have to be aware of the costs.
It is interesting to me that Scratch's explict loops (compared to Etoys' clock driven scripts) don't seem to cause any difficulties for beginners nor for young children. That shows how important it is to test stuff rather than follow our intuitions.
What I would really like (in the sense that I am trying to get funding to pay a group of people to build) would be a system within Croquet/Cobalt that would start out like Scratch, then become more and more like Etoys as the programmer's skills improved with a smooth path all the way to the Smalltalk level.
Jens Mönig, the guy who did BYOB (Build Your Own Block extension of Scratch), also created Elements, which is a Scratch syntax for Smalltalk-80:
http://www.chirp.scratchr.org/blog/?p=24
So it is easy enough to see how far this approach can scale.
-- Jecel
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
On Friday 16 Sep 2011 3:06:34 AM karl ramberg wrote:
I also looked at these two web forum pages discussing programming for kids pages today but not much love for Etoys:
http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/169225.html http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/kgbzq/why_we_should_teach_our_ kids_to_code/
There seems to be a mismatch from we perceive as values and strong features of Etoys and what other people see. Why do we not get the ideas out? What makes is so hard ? Do people test Etoys and drop it ?
Etoys requires people to think hard before putting ideas onto a project. This raises the barrier for students and journalists working against a deadline ;-).
Another aspect of Etoys will become apparent if you get kids to use Etoys in a language foreign to them (or say in dingbat fonts). Though the UI is graphical it still has a heavy text bias. I noticed this when helping children, illiterate in English, use Etoys. Painting lacks the directness of other Morphic ops like move, pickup etc. Beginners tend to the leave the Paint Tool on while saving their project. We could do more in simplifying the UI. For instance, compose sketches by long-pressing (embed) one Morph on another. Suzanne Guyader, author of Art and Etoys, had many nice ideas for easing compositions.
What Alan proposed about going beyond Scratch and Etoys in an earlier mail rings true from my own experience. I would throw in Tuxpaint into the mix. Tuxpaint uses sounds very well. We need something that takes the best parts of Etoys, Scratch and Tuxpaint and build a new Idea editor.
But then, we need to be able to look beyond software at the larger goal. The real question we should be asking is "Why aren't children acquiring fluency in learning with Etoys/Scratch/TuxPaint or whatchamacallit?"
Regards .. Subbu
On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 3:20 PM, K. K. Subramaniam kksubbu.ml@gmail.com wrote:
On Friday 16 Sep 2011 3:06:34 AM karl ramberg wrote:
I also looked at these two web forum pages discussing programming for kids pages today but not much love for Etoys:
http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/169225.html http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/kgbzq/why_we_should_teach_our_ kids_to_code/
There seems to be a mismatch from we perceive as values and strong features of Etoys and what other people see. Why do we not get the ideas out? What makes is so hard ? Do people test Etoys and drop it ?
Etoys requires people to think hard before putting ideas onto a project. This raises the barrier for students and journalists working against a deadline ;-).
Another aspect of Etoys will become apparent if you get kids to use Etoys in a language foreign to them (or say in dingbat fonts). Though the UI is graphical it still has a heavy text bias. I noticed this when helping children, illiterate in English, use Etoys. Painting lacks the directness of other Morphic ops like move, pickup etc. Beginners tend to the leave the Paint Tool on while saving their project. We could do more in simplifying the UI. For instance, compose sketches by long-pressing (embed) one Morph on another. Suzanne Guyader, author of Art and Etoys, had many nice ideas for easing compositions.
What Alan proposed about going beyond Scratch and Etoys in an earlier mail rings true from my own experience. I would throw in Tuxpaint into the mix. Tuxpaint uses sounds very well. We need something that takes the best parts of Etoys, Scratch and Tuxpaint and build a new Idea editor.
A few thoughts
My kids play The Sims 3 and Starcraft 2. The interfaces there are quite complex and the result is a kind of programming. It would be interesting to see if one could take these concepts a bit longer and make programming tools more game-like.
Maybe there could be "clip art" of ready players that give the novice less digressions.
It would be cool to get better scaling and higher speed than Etoys, to be able to collapse players down into each other to build complex players. It would be great to be able to build for example make a decoder for a video stream or a image form.
It's also hard now to share single players.
Debugging and to be able to step trough scripts would be very good.
Better tools for locking down the interface would be nice. Authoring would still be possible, but presentation would also be possible with fewer mishaps and accidental breakage of the carefully set up project.
It is hard to discuss tile scripts in mail lists text based forums. Screenshots are cumbersome and often a hassle. Scratch forums had some style scripts I think that made code render like tiles. I'm not sure how to deal with this issue. Maybe the discussion forums should be integrated into the programming environment ?
+ much more :-)
Cheers, Karl
But then, we need to be able to look beyond software at the larger goal. The real question we should be asking is "Why aren't children acquiring fluency in learning with Etoys/Scratch/TuxPaint or whatchamacallit?"
Regards .. Subbu
About programming for the masses, I see two educational reasons to insist on that. One (rather weak) reason is to demystify something that is everywhere. People will be dealing with software all the time and if having done one or two toy applications as a child makes them see that it is not magic then that is nice.
A much better reason is Papert's: so the children will have an object to think with. The idea is to learn to learn but we need a suitable way to talk about learning strategies. Normal school tends to encourage a very poor strategy: take a guess, see if the teacher confirms it is right and if not take another guess. Not only is the search time long and unbounded, you also need some external way of checking your results which is something you won't always have.
Teaching programming is just a way to be able to teach debugging, or successive approximation. You don't throw away incorrect attempts but instead build on them. And you learn to figure out for yourself if they are correct or not, and how far and in what way they are incorrect so you know what to change.
-- Jecel
squeakland@lists.squeakfoundation.org
-
Hilaire Fernandes -
Jecel Assumpcao Jr. -
K. K. Subramaniam -
karl ramberg