[EDUCATION] Porting new wine into old bottles

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Sat Sep 8 23:50:12 UTC 2001


Edwin --

Well, it's always more about the kids than about Squeak. A great 
system (in the hands of the right teachers) for this level machine is 
LOGO Microworlds. It is not free (and might not be available now), 
and I don't know what their site license costs.

Remembering that Smalltalk ran very acceptably all the way back in in 
the seventies (and that Digitalk Smalltalk/V ran well on the 7000), 
we can surmise that the central part of Squeak will also. Morphic 
might not run well enough to allow the children's etoy stuff to be 
used.

But, I'm sure that one fairly easily could set up a Microworlds like 
UI for the kids in Squeak, and this should run just as well as the 
official Microworlds. I would still use sketchmorphs that the kids 
make by painting. But it's likely that the DnD etoy UI will not have 
enough cycles to be friendly. But, you can still pretty easily set up 
to do textual scripting on the sketchmorphs -- and this would be very 
much like Microworlds in many respects. I think there is a preference 
that will turn off the Morphic animation for dragging stuff and 
replace it with outlines (like MVS). This should also make things 
easier.
      And, as Andreas mentioned, you might want to use the Squeakland 
Plugin image because of its small size.

However, I also seem to recall giving quite a few demos of the etoys 
on just the kind of machines you have, so it might work a lot better 
than we fear. You should be able to just use a vanilla Squeak on them.

Cheers,

Alan

------



At 6:05 PM -0700 9/7/01, Edwin Pilobello wrote:
>Hi Folks,
>
>I just visited a local elementary school computer lab with 24 PowerMac 7000
>series computers with OS 7.x
>
>Yes, they are "slow" and with limited capacity but they are networked.  Some
>are having serious hardware memory problems.  Unfortunately, after three
>defeats of the technology bond, there will me no replacements.   So, I'm
>thinking of volunteering as a SysAdmin and pumping these systems for all
>their worth.
>
>How can SQUEAK be made to run on the PowerMacs mentioned above?
>
>:-)  edwin


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