Killer demos for squeak (Was Re: Squeak Mentioned On O'Reilly

Mark Guzdial guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
Wed Oct 13 15:11:24 UTC 1999


>A universally available 3D adventure toolset that would allow educators and
>kids to create their own interactive 3D worlds would be ultra-good. I think
>that such a thing could eventually be devised to run under Squeak and would
>make Squeak the premier platform for education.

This is an area of interest for me, too -- and for much of Squeak Central,
too, I think.  Alan, Dan, Ted, Kim, and the rest of Squeak Central have
been doing this for many years.  Their opinions may differ from mine, but
here's what I've learned about trying to get toolsets used in education.

The value of Squeak for educational software is more than a 3D toolset (as
great as Squeak's 3D is).  Also there for potential great educational
benefit is all the great music and sound support, all the networking apps
both server/client, the flexibility of the Morphic toolset (have you played
with the menus on the BouncingAtomsMorph?  Try starting an infection then
graphing the time to saturation), the Viewer end-user programming system,
BookMorphs for Active Essays, etc.  (Relevant Side Note: Rodney Walker is
about to take his simplified MIDI player into a fourth grade classroom for
a pilot study of his music-and-math ideas)

But getting a toolset used in education is complicated.  Aiming for
teachers first is hard, since so few have the background to program, and no
teacher really has the time.  (Teachers are by far the most over-worked
professionals I've ever known.  Quick: Name one other profession you know
where the members often earn their Masters if not Doctorate degrees, yet
are not typically allowed to have telephones or computers on their desks!)
Aiming for students first can work, but teachers are the gatekeepers -- you
have to convince them it's worthwhile before they let it into their
classrooms, and that runs back into the first problem.

There is also a top-down approach, by going to educational technology
researchers, ed software companies, and administrators.  Of these
communities, I know ed tech research the best, and it's pretty heavily
invested in Java these days.  For example, the US National Science
Foundation (NSF) recently funded three national Centers for educational
technology (see http://www.cilt.org and http://www.letus.nwu.edu/ for two
of them), and they've become vocal advocates of Java in educational
technology.  There was just a big piece in IEEE Computer with the CILT
group advocating Java Beans as a way of creating reusable educational
components.   When I show Squeak to these people, and I explain that we
have complete source code compatability across many platforms, their jaws
literally drop.  But these Centers are pretty large, and after investing
many lines of programmer code, many hours of talks, and many papers on a
Java-based approach, it's not easy to shift to Squeak.  As one of the
Principal Investigators on the LETUS project said to me, "We've already bet
the farm on Java."

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html





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