On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 5:51 AM, mokurai@earthtreasury.org wrote:

Just so. This Reference Manual is aimed at the power user. Among other things, I am trying to learn how to use Squeak development to add facilities to Etoys.

I am still looking for documents that explain Etoys for the classroom teacher and the student without going behind them into Squeak development. I have found many that begin to explain parts of Etoys, but nothing that I consider satisfactory. For example, nothing that systematically explains what tiles are available for Etoys programming, and the places to find them. I know about

Object viewers The gold chest The function menus in some tiles

Are there more?

You can find all morphs that have additional morphic categories with the MethodFinder : WorldMenu/Open/MethodFinder.

Search for "additionsTo"

Karl

On Sat, September 8, 2012 9:16 am, karl ramberg wrote:

...

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 3:47 AM, mokurai@earthtreasury.org wrote:

...

I have discovered by trying many combinations that alt-shift-w brings up the World menu in Etoys on Ubuntu. I have added that and some other information to

http://booki.flossmanuals.net/etoys-reference-manual/_edit/

and I am about to add the keyboard shortcuts for the XO. (I have two of them, which I have named Thing1 and Thing2.)...First pass, done now.

Apparently I now know how to apply all that I know of Squeak (not a lot, but increasing) within Etoys, by bringing up menus that allow me to bring up everything else.

Is there a design document for Etoys explaining what its intention is? Am I right in thinking that it is meant to provide a greatly restricted programming environment on the surface, where only a few Squeak/Smalltalk objects and methods are available without going behind the scenes, chosen for younger children?

Squeak is the environment in which Etoys lives. While direct access to Squeak is possible its of most interest to power user. Its not hard to break the system running Squeak so access is made not easy to stumble uppon. A broken system is quite disruptive to most lectures and newbies.

Karl

...

-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks

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-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks

Thank you for your questions! That helps a lot for improving our documentation. Some of your questions should be answered by the reference manual, like this one

"For example, nothing that systematically explain what tiles are available for Etoys programming, and the places to find them. "

but obviously, we need to provide more guidance in the manual. The chapter 4, Common Tiles, explains most of the tiles in Etoys. We leave out some special tiles, which are only available for special objects. The tiles are organized by category in the manual, like they are organized in the object's viewer. I'll think how to change the introduction of chapter 4 to give a better idea of what to expect in the chapter.

Please let me know if this answers some of your questions!

Greetings, Rita

On Sep 9, 2012, at 5:51 AM, mokurai@earthtreasury.org wrote:

Just so. This Reference Manual is aimed at the power user. Among other things, I am trying to learn how to use Squeak development to add facilities to Etoys.

I am still looking for documents that explain Etoys for the classroom teacher and the student without going behind them into Squeak development. I have found many that begin to explain parts of Etoys, but nothing that I consider satisfactory. For example, nothing that systematically explains what tiles are available for Etoys programming, and the places to find them. I know about

Object viewers The gold chest The function menus in some tiles

Are there more?

On Sat, September 8, 2012 9:16 am, karl ramberg wrote:

...

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 3:47 AM, mokurai@earthtreasury.org wrote:

...

I have discovered by trying many combinations that alt-shift-w brings up the World menu in Etoys on Ubuntu. I have added that and some other information to

http://booki.flossmanuals.net/etoys-reference-manual/_edit/

and I am about to add the keyboard shortcuts for the XO. (I have two of them, which I have named Thing1 and Thing2.)...First pass, done now.

Apparently I now know how to apply all that I know of Squeak (not a lot, but increasing) within Etoys, by bringing up menus that allow me to bring up everything else.

Is there a design document for Etoys explaining what its intention is? Am I right in thinking that it is meant to provide a greatly restricted programming environment on the surface, where only a few Squeak/Smalltalk objects and methods are available without going behind the scenes, chosen for younger children?

Squeak is the environment in which Etoys lives. While direct access to Squeak is possible its of most interest to power user. Its not hard to break the system running Squeak so access is made not easy to stumble uppon. A broken system is quite disruptive to most lectures and newbies.

Karl

...

-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks

---

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-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks

---

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Rita Freudenberg rita.freudenberg@ovgu.de

Rita, could you check your e-mail settings, and see if you can turn on Unicode, so as not to mangle my signature block?

On Mon, September 10, 2012 5:04 am, Rita Freudenberg wrote:

Thank you for your questions! That helps a lot for improving our documentation. Some of your questions should be answered by the reference manual, like this one

...

"For example, nothing that systematically explain what tiles are available for Etoys programming, and the places to find them. "

Thank you. I see that now.

but obviously, we need to provide more guidance in the manual. The chapter 4, Common Tiles, explains most of the tiles in Etoys. We leave out some special tiles, which are only available for special objects.

I thought that the whole idea of a reference manual was to explain _everything_. That's how I did it as an API Tech Writer. Obviously, we cannot describe all of Squeak in an Etoys manual, but it seems to me that we need to explain how the two are related. I know how to get at the Squeak IDE using the World menu and various browsers for which there are keyboard shortcuts, plus the menus that appear within those browsers. I have been given some hints about which Squeak objects define Etoys behavior. Now I would like to see how to define an object in Squeak and put it into Etoys, in the manner of the games in the Object Catalog.

I know in principle how to treat Etoys as a glorified Turtle Art, in which I can script the movements and pen trails of any object, or as an animation studio, or as a presentation manager. I do not know how to evoke some of the other facilities, such as the particle model, and I remain unclear on what other facilities there are.

The Computer Science for Children possibilities are staggering, what with tree-structured programming and explicit parallelism, in addition to OOP in general. Similarly for math and science.

The tiles are organized by category in the manual, like they are organized in the object's viewer. I'll think how to change the introduction of chapter 4 to give a better idea of what to expect in the chapter.

I am considering adding some explanatory information there myself on the structure of tiles, and the different varieties. I would also like to see sections on variables, the tiles in the Gold Box menu, and the modifications to tiles in the math function menus. I have found three different math menus, but not the principle by which they are distributed.

Please let me know if this answers some of your questions!

Definitely. Thanks again. I have more questions today, and possibly some answers of my own.

I have started a set of Smalltalk/Squeak/Etoys pages at The Undiscoverable in the Sugar Labs Wiki. My idea is to provide the irreducible minimum, just enough hints and pointers to make the rest discoverable. As in the Sugar Labs version of Turtle Art, aka Turtle Blocks, tile-based Etoys programming is much more discoverable than text-based programming, but in both cases there are points that require hints or outright explanation. Like dragging assignment tiles by the arrow in order to put them into scripts. I see how that works, but I do not understand why it was done that way.

I find the GNU Smalltalk manual and Squeak by Example to be particularly helpful, and will add this Etoys Reference Manual to the list, but I am not satisfied with any Etoys tutorial that I have seen. SBE could be considerably improved, judging by my experience with what I did and did not learn from it.

But I am not happy with the materials for teaching any programming language. Part of the problem is that it's just hard, of course. In any case, I see that there is much more documentation to explore in the Smalltalk/Squeak/Etoys worlds.

I am having fun. I particularly enjoy being able to make presents for millions of children every day. Or at least, to work on the tools to make the presents.

Greetings, Rita

On Sep 9, 2012, at 5:51 AM, mokurai@earthtreasury.org wrote:

...

Just so. This Reference Manual is aimed at the power user. Among other things, I am trying to learn how to use Squeak development to add facilities to Etoys.

I am still looking for documents that explain Etoys for the classroom teacher and the student without going behind them into Squeak development. I have found many that begin to explain parts of Etoys, but nothing that I consider satisfactory. For example, nothing that systematically explains what tiles are available for Etoys programming, and the places to find them. I know about

Object viewers The gold chest The function menus in some tiles

Are there more?

On Sat, September 8, 2012 9:16 am, karl ramberg wrote:

...

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 3:47 AM, mokurai@earthtreasury.org wrote:

...

I have discovered by trying many combinations that alt-shift-w brings up the World menu in Etoys on Ubuntu. I have added that and some other information to

http://booki.flossmanuals.net/etoys-reference-manual/_edit/

and I am about to add the keyboard shortcuts for the XO. (I have two of them, which I have named Thing1 and Thing2.)...First pass, done now.

Apparently I now know how to apply all that I know of Squeak (not a lot, but increasing) within Etoys, by bringing up menus that allow me to bring up everything else.

Is there a design document for Etoys explaining what its intention is? Am I right in thinking that it is meant to provide a greatly restricted programming environment on the surface, where only a few Squeak/Smalltalk objects and methods are available without going behind the scenes, chosen for younger children?

Squeak is the environment in which Etoys lives. While direct access to Squeak is possible its of most interest to power user. Its not hard to break the system running Squeak so access is made not easy to stumble uppon. A broken system is quite disruptive to most lectures and newbies.

Karl

...

-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks

---

squeakland mailing list squeakland@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland

-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks

---

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Rita Freudenberg rita.freudenberg@ovgu.de

[Sigh] There is, according to tech support, no support for Unicode in Squirrel mail. I will change to another account.

This is curious, because my signature block displayed correctly in mail I have sent out. But such is the perversity of software.

On Tue, September 11, 2012 4:46 am, Bert Freudenberg wrote:

On 2012-09-10, at 21:18, mokurai@earthtreasury.org wrote:

...

Rita, could you check your e-mail settings, and see if you can turn on Unicode, so as not to mangle my signature block?

This is not Rita's fault. You are sending them incorrectly.

Your messages come in as plain ASCII:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

and they do have these ASCII sequences in it:

(默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج)

It is entirely correct for an email client to show these characters just like that. No interpretation is supposed to be performed.

You need to configure your email client to use UTF-8 instead of ASCII if you want Unicode chars in it. You appear to be using a web mailer running SquirrelMail. SquirrelMail can be configured to use UTF-8. Possibly you need to contact the iPage.com support team for that.

HTH,

• Bert -

On Sat, September 8, 2012 12:32 pm, K. K. Subramaniam wrote:

On Friday 07 Sep 2012 9:47:23 PM mokurai@earthtreasury.org wrote:

...

Apparently I now know how to apply all that I know of Squeak (not a lot, but increasing) within Etoys, by bringing up menus that allow me to bring up everything else.

Etoys is a visual scripting layer built on top of Squeak. You enter it by pressing the "eye" halo icon. This will bring up a vertical "chest of drawers" containing scripting tiles that can be dragged onto the work area to assemble a script. The tiles are a veneer over Smalltalk (you can get to the underlying text through a menu item from the "gold box" along the top of the script window.

I see that there are additional tiles in the gold box on each script window toolbar, and in menus accessible by clicking on arithmetic and other math functions within scripts.

...

Is there a design document for Etoys explaining what its intention is? Am I right in thinking that it is meant to provide a greatly restricted programming environment on the surface, where only a few Squeak/Smalltalk objects and methods are available without going behind the scenes, chosen for younger children?

See under Resources in squeakland.org site. Particularly Alan Kay's articles and the book "Powerful Ideas in the Classroom". Etoys is also covered heavily in "Squeakers DVD" in A/V. It is a summary of the various ideas presented in these articles.

Etoys is meant for middle-schoolers to explore [computable] ideas without preconceived notions. However, it does have a higher "floor" compared to Scratch. Learning is faster if there is someone to guide over the shoulder in the beginning.

We need to provide for schoolchildren who have no access to human guides. In fact, we need to provide for children who have no access to schools. OLPC is conducting an experiment with XOs in villages without schools, without even a single literate adult. The children are learning a lot of computer skills, and are learning the alphabet. The next step should be Same-Language-Subtitling (as in India) with text-to-speech in local languages.

Later, kids can ease into Smalltalk code right within Etoys (like Bert does in his projects in the Showcase ;-)).

Yes, I see that one can call up the Squeak development tools using keyboard shortcuts, and that one can get the text of any tile-based Etoys script.

HTH .. Subbu

Hello, Edward,

If you have not read these, you may find them of value:

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2005001_learning.pdf

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2005002_authoring.pdf

-- Kim

On Sep 10, 2012, at 1:01 PM, mokurai@earthtreasury.org wrote:

The Etoys4OLPC document describes modifications for XO laptops and Sugar, but does not explain what Etoys was originally designed to do. As I understand it, the idea is to have an environment in which objects can be constructed graphically and scripted fairly extensively, but new object types cannot be defined, in order to limit possible damage and limit complexity. But there is clearly more to it than that.

On Sun, September 9, 2012 7:49 am, David Corking wrote:

...

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 2:47 AM, mokurai wrote:

...

Is there a design document for Etoys explaining what its intention is?

I think this 2009 C5 paper may be the most recent design document:

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2009001_etoys4olpc.pdf

Hope that helps, David _______________________________________________ squeakland mailing list squeakland@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland

-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks

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