[TEACH][DOCS] Re: I want to document but I need to learn first!

Hannes Hirzel hannes.hirzel.squeaklist at bluewin.ch
Tue Mar 11 07:25:36 UTC 2003


Dear Jerry

Thank you for sending in your two long mails. I do not have the time
to answer them thouroughly the next too days but I would welcome a
discussion on these issues which may last even a few months.

So I just answer one point and suggest
a way to organize the discussion which will (hopefully) follow.

Jerry Balzano <gjbalzano at ucsd.edu> wrote:
> > I think it needs to be emphasized over and over again that Squeak
> >is a research system. It is not a completed product, but a work in
> >progress, and that causes ome of the frustrations teachers and other
> >novices experience.
> 
> But John, I really don't consider myself a "novice" in the sense that I
> think you mean.  NetLogo (the Illinois version of StarLogo)  is a research
> system too, but I have learned to program in it pretty well, and to teach
> others to program in it pretty effectively themselves, **even though it is
> much "harder" than Squeak**.
> 

Trying to come up with a specific answer...

A problem here surely is that Squeak can be considered a superset of
Logo
in terms of the size of the library. The programming model is more
complex;
in Logo you achieve exciting results if you combine a few  two or three
sentences procedures. The Logo-IDE is more limited but that makes it
easier to 
teach and learn.
Squeak (Smalltalk) offers more possibilites, but many are not well
worked out; for
this reason you see all this "cleaning and harvesting fixes" efforts
under way.
Squeak e-toys actually offers fewer possibilites than Logo in a sense
but this has been deliberately chosen by Alan Kay (cf. mailing list
archives)

I think the approach Stephane Ducasse is using is good for teaching. 
He is a universtity teacher (software engineering) but his his wife is 
a teacher as well. I do not know for which age of the children.
Stef has written a browser for doing turtle graphics that basically
allows
you to work in logo style. This approach is surely worth beeing
discussed
further. (StarSqueak etc.)

Another problem I perceive is that Squeak is "sold" for children K-5 and
up.
A psychologist I'm in contact with thinks that is way too early and he
pointed me to reading Piaget which I didn't do yet. I rather think
Squeak
would be fine for doing K-9 to K-12, and/or college, university level.

How should we proceed?

You mentioned that you have a list of 40 questions or so?
We could either discuss them here or you could write them to a swiki
pages; (title to be defined)
The swiki page would then be the working place while we
comment on it here. The documentation team needs this kind of questions.
They are a very valuable contribution for driving the documentation 
forward.

May I suggest to use a tag [TEACH], perhaps combinded with [DOCS],
in the title of the emails which follow discussing this issue.

Many people use email filters (especially nice in CELESTE) to navigate
within the thousands of mails .

This will allow somebody to come up with a summary of the discussion
spread out in many threads.

As you cross post to the Squeakland mailing list you are probably 
following that discussion as well. I am there a well but do not
closey follow the topics discussed.

My personal summary (reflecting my momentary state of knowledge)

1) e-toys is  a research prototype which needs close following by
the original researchers. 

2) Squeak developer edition (with classic Smalltalk) could be a good
replacement for Logo; the environment is very rich 	which makes it
attractive but there are not enough fences and it is easy to get lost. 
Beginner level documentation (and probably other as well is
still relatively poor, but we are working on it). The debugger as a
main point of interaction with the system when programming could
be more user friendly (Daniel Vainsencher wrote about this)
If you could join the documentation team for example in the role 
of a "customer" just asking questions that would be incredibly great!
Even a an effort of 4..8 hours to put together a list would really
help.

Regards

Hannes


P.S. Excuse my English writing style. To write such an email
in a very polished style would need a lot more effort from
my side and I think I get the message through this way. 
It is a kind of trade-off (time used / result).
In the documentation team we have language and editing experts.



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