Hi
I agree with your first paragraph (although I don't know of really discoverable
programming systems -- even Scratch has lots of conventions that are hard to
discover). But I do agree that 5-10% of an population is better matched up to a
given topic, and that the rest need more help of different kinds.
But there are good materials for learning Etoys, especially in Spanish, and
especially for teachers.
The last part I don't agree with because it contains a misconception about how
to teach Etoys, and especially programming, to children and adults.
We found -- via many attempts -- that 1 on 1 -- then branching out -- works
much much better than trying to teach a group. The "Drive a Car" project was
invented to be the introduction, and it can be taught 1 on 1 in about 20
minutes. Now we have two teachers of "Drive a Car". Then 4 etc. It is worth
taking the 100 minutes to carry this out. The reason for this approach is found
in your first paragraph, and the key is the 1 on 1 which allows the time needed
for specific learnings and questions about the project.
Once a class has gotten going, then should eventually be the "first teachers"
for the next class, and now the whole new class can be handled in ~30 minutes
for the first exercise. This use of "peer teaching" works in other areas also,
but it is particularly effective in technique learning. It is not used nearly
enough (many pro teachers feel a loss of authority, and that is more important
to them that in how well the children are learning).
Cheers
Alan
From: Sora Edwards-Thro <[email protected]>
To: Gonzalo Odiard <[email protected]>
Cc: Alan Kay <[email protected]>; Tim Falconer <[email protected]>; IAEP
SugarLabs <[email protected]>; "[email protected]"
<[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2015 4:18 PM
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Future Direction
On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 6:49 PM, Gonzalo Odiard <[email protected]> wrote:
We see that all time, is not surprising at all.Some (but not all) kids will try
until find the way,and many adults are used to a more structured way of
learning,and are afraid of "break something".
Everyone's capable of thinking critically and being creative, but not in the
same ways. Within a class of 20 kids, you'll get maybe 3 max who can figure
e-Toys out on their own (in our experience, working with 4th - 6th graders in
Haiti). Then there's another kid in the class who's good at writing, another
who's good at playing music, another who's a natural leader, and so on...people
have different talents. In the developing world, there are kids who can figure
out e-Toys on their own but in my experience the whole class of kids will not
do that - maybe because it does not come naturally to them, maybe because they
are not as interested in it, who knows?
A good teacher will be able to guide the kids who are not excited about the
software itself so that they can make something exciting with it. I agree,
Gonzalo, that adults in general want more structure than kids. But another part
of why teachers want a manual is so they can give their students advice on how
to do specific things. A kid raises their hand with a question about how to do
something; you want to be able to give them the answer.
The materials that have already been created for e-Toys are great and we've
used them. And it's not like things are that hard to do once you've learned.
But just the way the menus work, the number of clicks it takes to get to
something cool is unfortunately too many in a lot of cases. That's if you're
looking to teach a class of 20 students at once, and you also want to teach
other things besides e-Toys. Different models (targeting only advanced
students, letting the kids play around on their own over months of time) would
work differently.
On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 5:04 PM, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote:
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:
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
--
Gonzalo Odiard
SugarLabs - Software for children learning
_______________________________________________
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
