Re: [IAEP] scratch gone missing
On 07.11.2009, at 04:48, Bill Kerr wrote: On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 11:35 PM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 11:10, Bill Kerr billk...@gmail.com wrote: http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/browse/type:1/cat:107 How come scratch is no longer available for sugar? (the link is to the programming category of sugar activities) You mean Scratch was available in ASLO but isn't any more? No but it should be there since Scratch has a far better UI than Etoys Agreed on the should be there part. As for better UI: Scratch does what it does incredibly well. If all you want to do can be done in Scratch then it is an excellent tool. Etoys is way more powerful, but comparatively hard to get into. OTOH Etoys does integrate into Sugar reasonably well, unlike Scratch. If platform conformity was the sole criterium for better UI then Etoys would win hands down, with its Journal and Collaboration support. But another, maybe even more important difference is that Etoys is an open-source community project. So if there is an Etoys itch you know how to scratch (pun intended): patches welcome :) - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] scratch gone missing
On Saturday 07 November 2009 09:18:05 am Bill Kerr wrote: No but it should be there since Scratch has a far better UI than Etoys I have seen kids play with both Scratch and Etoys and I wouldn't pit them against each other. They appeal to different sets of children. Scratch appeals to a younger lot (6-9yrs) as the built-in sprites are more concrete. Etoys morphs are more attuned to older kids (9+) that are transitioning from concrete to abstract ideas. I wish we had a smooth transition in terms of visual themes and controls for Tuxpaint (3-6) - Scratch (6-9) - Etoys (9+) Just my take .. Subbu ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Guardian: PlayPower: 1980s computing for the 21st century
Anyone know these guys? I wonder how feasible it would be down the road to share content. The games they are porting seem like they would also be good for Sugar. On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 4:33 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/04/playpower-80s-computing-21st-century I taught myself BASIC and then 6502 assembly language on a Commodore VIC-20 with COMPUTE! magazine back in the day. But what I really liked was the incredibly friendly little manual, such as this priceless advice for the BASIC prompt: hit Enter a couple of times to clear it out. Any engineer would have insisted (correctly) that this was unnecessary... but that anonymous manual writer was a psychologist; s/he knew that a computing novice nervous about harming the machine could quickly gain confidence with that little tic. Sean. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove carol...@solutiongrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Guardian: PlayPower: 1980s computing for the 21st century
Caroline Meeks wrote: Anyone know these guys? I had a chat with them. I wonder how feasible it would be down the road to share content. The games they are porting seem like they would also be good for Sugar. All you need is a NES (Nitendo Entertainment System) emulator as a Sugar activity and you will be able to use any software that they produce. There might be legal issues (the article talked about expired patents but ignored copyrights for the old software), but those would apply just as much to their project. I noticed this discussion about running the xmame emulator on the XO: http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=1898.msg26027 Unfortunately, sharing in the other direction is totally impossible. -- Jecel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Guardian: PlayPower: 1980s computing for the 21st century
On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 10:33 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/04/playpower-80s-computing-21st-century Interesting. Though the challenge they have -- localising closed src binaries... to non ASCII-using locales -- is rather hard. Hard not to note the very misinformed description of OLPC in Uruguay: Recently, the project made a group to provide computers for every student in Uruguay, but after years of deal-making and political machinations, it is still only making relatively slow progress. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] scratch gone missing
On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 11:43 PM, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.dewrote: On 07.11.2009, at 04:48, Bill Kerr wrote: On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 11:35 PM, Tomeu Vizoso to...@sugarlabs.org wrote: On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 11:10, Bill Kerr billk...@gmail.com wrote: http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/browse/type:1/cat:107 How come scratch is no longer available for sugar? (the link is to the programming category of sugar activities) You mean Scratch was available in ASLO but isn't any more? No but it should be there since Scratch has a far better UI than Etoys Agreed on the should be there part. As for better UI: Scratch does what it does incredibly well. If all you want to do can be done in Scratch then it is an excellent tool. Etoys is way more powerful, but comparatively hard to get into. thanks for replying Bert I'm not sure what you mean by Etoys being way more powerful. I would agree that Kedama, the parallel tile particle system, is way more powerful than anything in Scratch. Did you have something more in mind? For teachers the ability to make an easy start with a program is very important. When teaching a group then if several students encounter something they can't solve then it creates huge problems, especially for difficult to manage classes. And even for more advanced students features that are easy to find and work smoothly are important so that they can focus clearly on the challenging learning (scripting) rather than hunting around for where the tools are. There are a whole lot of features in Scratch that makes this possible (as you acknowledge). I haven't spelt out those features in detail here but will run some more tests and attempt to do so soon. One of my students mentions some of them here: http://soeasyman123.blogspot.com/2009/11/great-race.html I found Etoys very troublesome for a few reasons. 1. was because whenever I tried to save it would just close the program and I would jsut simply lose all my work. this occurred to me 3 times. 2. I couldn't view the scripts while having the cars move because the scripts would get in the way of the test. 3. the scripts were always in the way of the pictures so i had to close them everytime i finished with them which was very time consuming. 4. the drawing tools on Etoys aren't the greatest tools you could get. Although these reasons were troublesome I found Etoys interesting because there were so many scripts and other things to play with My inclination has been to try to transition students from scratch to python - but it doesn't work all that well I think in part because Scratch is *entirely* visual drag and drop tiles and the transition to text based programming is too abrupt for many. It might work better with etoys if the intended transition was from etoys to smalltalk (squeak). That might be a better way to go but a harder sell in a school environment (since python is a better known language and also fits in with Sugar) I think that GameMaker (proprietary but a free version is available) handles this issue best - it has drag and drop for beginners and a code window for more advanced and you can mix and match scripts using both features together. I know that etoys has a code window but I found it very difficult to use successfully. OTOH Etoys does integrate into Sugar reasonably well, unlike Scratch. If platform conformity was the sole criterium for better UI then Etoys would win hands down, with its Journal and Collaboration support. ok - with SoaS my efforts to enable collaboration on our school network have not been successful so although I have seen these features (in a session organised by Donna Benjamin in Melbourne a year ago) my students haven't been able to enjoy them unfortunately But another, maybe even more important difference is that Etoys is an open-source community project. So if there is an Etoys itch you know how to scratch (pun intended): patches welcome :) Yes, I suspect this (the license) is the main issue which I raised with Mitch Resnick (and on this list) last year and wrote a blog summing it up: http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2008/11/scratch-license-disappointment.html The last word in the comments on my blog comes from Tom Hofmann: Neither license is a free or open source license. The binary one limits modification, the source one limits use and redistribution. They're just unfree in different ways. So I guess it's really up to the Scratch team at MIT to improve the license and their failure to do that has resulted in Sugar Labs downgrading its distribution perhaps not consciously but as a slipping into darkness event - Bert - ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
Re: [IAEP] The Guardian: PlayPower: 1980s computing for the 21st century
Martin Langhoff wrote: Interesting. Though the challenge they have -- localising closed src binaries... to non ASCII-using locales -- is rather hard. The non ASCII is a complication, but changing binaries was very popular in Brazil in the 1980s (the copyright law here was only extended to software in 1987). A serious limitation of this project is that just because the machines are openly being sold in a market in India (here in Brazil too, but closer $100 than $12...) doesn't mean that there are no legal issues. Nintendo is simply ignoring them as few units are sold compared to normal PCs or modern videogame consoles. If this project is a success and sales increase significantly, this could quickly change. It is odd that the article talks about expired patents as the reason for lower prices. Most early machines weren't even patented: the original PC (1981) wasn't, the PC AT (1984) had seven patents in all and the PS/2 (1987) was the first one that IBM tried to seriously protect and it backfired on them. The main factor for the low costs is Moore's law: you can either get twice the transistors for the same price in 18 months or the same transistors for about half the cost. The PC industry has mostly followed the first option while the OLPC was explicitly created to take advantage of the decreasing costs curve instead. Building in 2007 what was essentially a mid range laptop from 1997 got you an entirely new price point. If we imagine the Famicom (the current $12 computer) in 1985 with about $30 of electronics and the Commodore Amiga with $300 in the same year, in 1997 eight cycles of Moore's law would have passed and we would have $0.12 and $1.17 of electronics in modern remakes of these machines. Except that packaging and testing would be about the same for both options and the costs of the case and keyboard would totally dominate the sales price. I guess the point of trying to make educational use of a $12 Famicom (NES in the USA) instead of a more reasonable $13 Amiga is that the first exists and is being sold right now. But like I said, the volumes are not impressive. If the numbers are to be expanded to cover whole poor countries then the investment that has to be made could certainly support a little development, right? It has been done before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV The reason why I said the Amiga was more reasonable is that the PlayPower plan is to allow people to connect to the Internet. Even the Commodore 64 has a new operating system (Contiki) that allows that in a very limited way, but the Famicom is just too weak. I would love to see a project like this be a massive success, but don't think the path they are taking is the best option. -- Jecel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Guardian: PlayPower: 1980s computing for the 21st century
On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 11:48 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr je...@merlintec.com wrote: The non ASCII is a complication, but changing binaries was very popular in Brazil in the 1980s (the copyright law here was only extended to software in 1987). I am argentine, and grew up patching binaries on the C=64. It's been downhill from there ;-) Anyway, the point is: within ascii, you can binary-patch to localise (with some imagination and elbow grease). But non-latin scripts are... very hard. Even for th open source projects mentioned -- anything like utf8 text handling on 8bit cpus is just going to be pain. They're more likely to use cranky codepages. Ugh. I sure don't want to return to *that* world. The main factor for the low costs is Moore's law: you can either get twice the transistors for the same price in 18 months or the same transistors for about half the cost. I don't think it's quite like that. Making chips is only cheap if you have huge volume. Basic QA of chips and boards is costly. Assembly (it has countless parts) is costly too. Financing a production run requires a lot of money, and stocking all of that costs... lots. It's very likely the they are just selling very old stock -- that's the only thing that'd explain the price. As soon as it runs out, any crazy entrepreneur that wants to make more will find out the real costs. Anyway, it's a great project, if limited. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Guardian: PlayPower: 1980s computing for the 21st century
Elonex One clones are available right now for about $75 USD in quantities over 100. They were released original well after the XO 1, and have about similar hardware. Originally they sold for about $300. The XO seems to be about the only one defying Moore's :-) While the (heavily subsidized) pricepoint of $200 was totally amazing in 2007, right now it is rather unimpressive On 11/8/09, Jecel Assumpcao Jr je...@merlintec.com wrote: Martin Langhoff wrote: Interesting. Though the challenge they have -- localising closed src binaries... to non ASCII-using locales -- is rather hard. The non ASCII is a complication, but changing binaries was very popular in Brazil in the 1980s (the copyright law here was only extended to software in 1987). A serious limitation of this project is that just because the machines are openly being sold in a market in India (here in Brazil too, but closer $100 than $12...) doesn't mean that there are no legal issues. Nintendo is simply ignoring them as few units are sold compared to normal PCs or modern videogame consoles. If this project is a success and sales increase significantly, this could quickly change. It is odd that the article talks about expired patents as the reason for lower prices. Most early machines weren't even patented: the original PC (1981) wasn't, the PC AT (1984) had seven patents in all and the PS/2 (1987) was the first one that IBM tried to seriously protect and it backfired on them. The main factor for the low costs is Moore's law: you can either get twice the transistors for the same price in 18 months or the same transistors for about half the cost. The PC industry has mostly followed the first option while the OLPC was explicitly created to take advantage of the decreasing costs curve instead. Building in 2007 what was essentially a mid range laptop from 1997 got you an entirely new price point. If we imagine the Famicom (the current $12 computer) in 1985 with about $30 of electronics and the Commodore Amiga with $300 in the same year, in 1997 eight cycles of Moore's law would have passed and we would have $0.12 and $1.17 of electronics in modern remakes of these machines. Except that packaging and testing would be about the same for both options and the costs of the case and keyboard would totally dominate the sales price. I guess the point of trying to make educational use of a $12 Famicom (NES in the USA) instead of a more reasonable $13 Amiga is that the first exists and is being sold right now. But like I said, the volumes are not impressive. If the numbers are to be expanded to cover whole poor countries then the investment that has to be made could certainly support a little development, right? It has been done before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV The reason why I said the Amiga was more reasonable is that the PlayPower plan is to allow people to connect to the Internet. Even the Commodore 64 has a new operating system (Contiki) that allows that in a very limited way, but the Famicom is just too weak. I would love to see a project like this be a massive success, but don't think the path they are taking is the best option. -- Jecel ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] The Guardian: PlayPower: 1980s computing for the 21st century
I apologize. As a member of PlayPower, I will have to help them see what is happening in Uruguay, that 400 K computers have been delivered, albeit the issue of content useful for the classroom is not yet solved there either. On 11/8/09, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 10:33 PM, Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/04/playpower-80s-computing-21st-century Interesting. Though the challenge they have -- localising closed src binaries... to non ASCII-using locales -- is rather hard. Hard not to note the very misinformed description of OLPC in Uruguay: Recently, the project made a group to provide computers for every student in Uruguay, but after years of deal-making and political machinations, it is still only making relatively slow progress. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
