So, I'm using eToys to teach a nine-year-old to program. He's enjoying the
painting and playing with morphs, which is good. I think he'll like the
actual programming, too, when we get to it. But I have noticed a few
things:

1. The icons in the tutorials don't show up correctly (i.e., not lined up
where they should be)

2. It's easy for him to do something he shouldn't (in the sense of getting
into a place he might have trouble getting out of). So far, though, it's
been easy for him to get back, which is good.

3. Every now and again during painting, the desktop would "lock up". It
seemed to enter some sort of modality which neither of us could tell what
it was for or how to get out of it, short of exiting the painting mode
entirely.

Not perfect, but not bad. A damn sight better than the other options, I
think. My main concern now is keeping him moving forward. Especially since
I find the eToys environment rather cumbersome. (I confess to cheating at
first and opening a code window to directly edit routines rather than try
to figure out what needs to be clicked-and/or-dragged, but I'm avoiding
that now.)

I'm trying to construct a simple Lunar Lander game which, I hope, will be
instructive about gravity as well as programming. However, I've hit some
snags:

4. I've drawn a "lunar terrain" morph as an outline and was thinking about
filling it in. However, when I click the repaint halo button, the canvas
that comes up is wider than the terrain, which is squashed. This happens
consistently. If I paint something that takes the full horizontal width of
the canvas, and then repaint, it won't take the whole width any more.

5. When you pull out an assignment tile by clicking on the <-, when it
goes into a script viewer, the <- becomes an underscore. Have I got font
problems or is this a bug?

6. It's cool that eToys tells you when you try to remove a variable that's
in use; an "undo" would also be nice.

7. Trying to use the "remove [item]" menu option on a variable brings up a
debug window. Since the Squeakland stuff doesn't have this problem, this
(and others) may be the result of my image (which is probably overloaded
with squeak packages).

8. Is there any eToy keyboard handler/script? Lunar Lander's a bit awkward
with a mouse.

9. How hard is it to make new tiles for eToy use? What's the base class?

Thanks for any and all feedback.