On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 04:01:02PM +1100, Glenn Alexander wrote:
> Hi,  
>   
> I'm very new to this.  
>   
> I wrote a little morphic object and I have put it at:   
>   
> http://www.shoalhaven.net.au/~glenalec/squeak/insults.st  
>   
> It is actually two objects as I thought it might be a good idea to  
> split the string generation from the display morph so it is more  
> re-usable.  
>   
> If anyone wants to give me some constructive criticism on my  
> programming, it would be welcome! They are VERY small objects. If I  
> get the code looking like an example of good programming, I can write  
> a short tutorial on how I did it, if people think that's useful for  
> other newbies.  

Hi,
Stephane Ducasse gave some good suggestions for improvements. Good
job on your first Squeaklet!

This may well prove to the the first killer app for Squeak. The kids
are going to absolutely *love* it. In addition to being fun, it could
be used to teach kids about grammar and sentence structure.

Squeak is often used for teaching kids (www.squeakland.org). Often the
teaching projects (is that what they are called?) emphasize visual
modes of thinking, and geometric ideas. It strikes me that not all
people think naturally in this way (after all there are other kinds of
abstract thought), and maybe a Squeak project that allows kids to
build a complete sentence out of parts of speech would be a worthwhile
addition. And if the end result of the project was something that spits
out funny insults, there would be plenty of motivation to learn.

This is getting a little complicated for a first project, but wouldn't
it be interesting to have NounMorph and VerbMorph and so forth, and
connect them together in ways that turn into a complete InsultMorph?
I think kids might have fun with that.

Dave