Interesting that 5th graders learn Etoys very easily but teachers find "the
learning curve too steep" hmmmmmm
Cheers
Alan
From: Bert Freudenberg <[email protected]>
To: Caryl Bigenho <[email protected]>
Cc: IAEP SugarLabs <[email protected]>; Tim Falconer
<[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2015 11:57 AM
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Future Direction
On 04.03.2015, at 10:44, Caryl Bigenho <[email protected]> wrote:
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Hi...
Some thoughts about Etoys: Tim Falconer and other folks at Waveplace
(deployments around the Caribbean) have made excellent use of Etoys and have
made a series of lessons about its use available
at:http://www.waveplace.com/courseware/basic-etoys/
However, I don't recall seeing anywhere that they use many other parts of Sugar
with the students. So the question could become: does Etoys need to be
"packaged" with Sugar.
Something to consider in answering the question is that Etoys is available in a
very portable version as "Etoys to Go": http://www.squeakland.org/download/
One nice feature about Etoys To Go is that you can put it on a thumb drive and
move it from a Linux machine to a Windows machine to a Mac machine and the
files will all be readable and usable! Also, it leaves nothing behind on the
host machine. It is all on the usb drive!
We can thank Bert Freudenberg for that! I'm adding him to this conversation so
he might be able to give us an update on the latest news from Etoys… is a
version for Android and/or IOS coming that would also be as portable as the
current Etoys To Go? Universal portability would be a wonderful goal (for Sugar
too)!
Supporting all the different platforms natively is too much work given our
limited resources. Something that could become the "universal" version is this
browser-based version (but that too needs work to optimize performance, and
support other browsers than Chrome):
http://bertfreudenberg.github.io/SqueakJS/etoys/
Personally, like Sora, I have found the Etoys learning curve a bit steep. Once
I did a workshop about Etoys To Go for a roomful of tech-saavy teachers. They
just really didn't get it. I also tried to contribute to a project where some
folks were making some science lessons in Etoys… but found it really difficult
to get it to do what I wanted it too.
Yep. Etoys was designed with extensive teacher training in mind, but that
training never happened on a large scale. Scratch learned from that lesson, and
while as a result it is not as powerful as Etoys, it is much more approachable
and discoverable.
Btw, recently Tim Rowledge worked on the ARM version of Squeak for the
Raspberry Pi, which both Etoys and Scratch benefit from. That should benefit
the XO-4 too.
Yet, my favorite little ecology simulation is an Etoys featured project "Fish
And Plankton". It is great fun to experiment with and can teach some powerful
lessons! http://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7303 Try letting it
run overnight with different starting parameters and see what happens…. fun!
Yes, that's a nice one. It even works in Etoys/JS (if you can wait long enough
for it to finish
loading):http://bertfreudenberg.github.io/SqueakJS/etoys/#fullscreen=true&document=http://freudenbergs.de/bert/squeakjs/FishAndPlankton.017.pr
- Bert -
Caryl
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2015 13:43:01 -0300
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
CC: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Future Direction
If we abandon etoys to maintain compatibility with Fedora, what has the
end-user gained?
We (SugarLabs) don't abandon etoys to maintain compatibility with Fedora.Fedora
request a change on etoys, but Bert (who maintains etoys) is working for
free,then we can't force him to dedicate hours to work on that.
Would a GSOC effort be better devoted to moving from Scratch 1 to Scratch 2
than rewriting imageviewer?
I don't know. Scratch 2 use Flash and need Adobe Air, then we need check how
works in the XOs.I have read Scratch team is working in HTML5 version, that
would be great.
About rewrite imageviewer, if we want allow use Sugar to kids without XOs,we
need move forward to HTML5/Js. Maybe Image Viewer is not a prioritary
activity,but is a good task to introduce developers because is relatively easy.
Anyway the proposed tasks for GSoC are only a start, you can propose other, and
we will need do a selectionwhen Google define how many projects will fund.
Gonzalo
_______________________________________________IAEP -- It's An Education
Project (not a laptop
project!)[email protected]http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
_______________________________________________
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
[email protected]
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
_______________________________________________
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
[email protected]
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
