Hi Brent --

At 9:31 AM -0500 3/11/03, Brent Vukmer wrote:
>  > Our previous plans to make a kind of "superhypercard" and then 
>get version 2 of etoys from
>>  that much more  comprehensive design did not work out at Disney, 
>>and it wasn't until recently
>>  that we've been able to get that plan going again. I think this is 
>>more like the system you want, and
>>  you'll have a chance to try it out this summer .
>
>The super-HyperCard and etoys 2.0 sound really cool based on what 
>you've said.  I'm just curious -- who's doing this development?

A bunch of us led by Andreas Raab.

>  Will there be a Squeakland update stream that interested folks can 
>point their images at?

Perhaps another site.

>
>[ cool story about working in current eToys environment ] 
>
>[ *really* cool description of eToys scripts ]
>
>Will your design diagrams and/or scripts for the projects you 
>described, be available online somewhere?

When we get to something that is good enough to be criticized.

>
>I went to the Squeakland mail archive and read the post that listed 
>those project ideas ( 
>http://squeakland.org/listarchive/squeakland/msg00523.html ). In 
>that email you said something about "hints and project books".  Are 
>"project books" done in Squeak project form, or written up on the 
>Squeakland swiki?

Good question -- like to help with the answer? I've tried lots of 
approaches to this very interesting problem: how to close the gap 
between the ease of thinking up an etoy project and making it and the 
amount of work needed to explain it, annotate it, etc., to help 
others see how to do things like it. Scott and I are at work at yet 
another attempt at making this work better (or at all).

>
>>  I think that quite a bit of success for different kinds of people 
>>is the match up between types of
>>  thinking, types of motivation, and the kinds of materials and 
>>scaffolding available. Some teachers have
>>  been amazingly successful with our inadequate documentation and 
>>others have been less successful that one
>>  would expect, given the amount of documentaiton that is there. 
>>Many children who like to explore and don't
>>  want to read documentation have done even better. Some children 
>>are quite stumped without explicit help
>>  (but that's what teachers are supposed to be for.)
>
>I think that I'm definitely one of the folks that is quite stumped 
>without explicit help. It seems like the whole eToys / 
>direct-manipulation thing has got to really "click" for someone; 
>maybe it's a ca

I think the difficulty with etoys -- for the people who do have 
difficulties -- is that the combination of the limited scripting 
features and the different object model requires latching onto a 
particular style of outlook in order to "see" what's easily doable 
and what isn't worth trying to do. This is why I was initially 
against BJ and Kim trying etoys in the school -- there is a real 
sense in which it isn't general enough. However, what they showed me 
is that it is pretty easy to help the children stay within a fruitful 
style and that there are many other features of etoys that make the 
children incredibly productive and creative. So this worked like 
gangbusters -- they were right and I was wrong.

     For example, the single biggest drawback to etoys right now is 
that the UI is *extremely* biased towards simple whole lines of 
script with very simple substitutions. It will allow you to make 
complex expressions (sort of by doing it backwards) but it just isn't 
set up for this. A much better approach would be one that was 
inspired by etoys but much more comprehensive: the Alice 2 interface 
from our friends at CMU. This is really nice, and one can get some 
great ideas about a left to right direct manipulation expression 
building UI. We will probably try something like this in the stuff 
we'll show this summer.

So the people who have been very successful at etoys are those that 
are comfortable with any limited palette they are given. This has to 
be widened before we can declare etoys to be a real release.

>
>>  But the clear lesson is that we need to provide enough coverage 
>>for a wide range of styles of learning. Please continue to > be 
>>interested and to help.
>
>Thanks for the lengthy email!  Very helpful.

Keep on asking questions -- they are very helpful to me.

Cheers,

Alan



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