[Sugar-news] Sugar Digest 2010-07-28

[Walter Bender]

==Sugar Digest==

1. Twitter-style: Hello from Squeakfest in Wilmington, North Carolina.
We just had a demonstration of some Etoys projects done by 7th
graders; pretty amazing. One student, when asked what she does to keep
from getting frustrated said: "Damn computer." But she is an
accomplished problem solver.

This is the first conference I have been to in years where the
majority of presenters are ''not'' using PowerPoint. Naturally,
by-in-large, they are using Etoys for their talks.

It is great to see how teachers have incorporated the tool into their
curriculum and the realities of school: even the kids built "quizzes"
into their projects. But most of the learning is guided discovery.

In many cases, kids use Etoys from a USB drive, so they could take
their work home and turn in their homework.

Bert Freudenberg showed an eloquent way to make animations in Etoys. I
am inspired to finally add animation to my sprite library (the one I
use for all of my activities: Turtle Art, Abacus, Visual Match, etc.)
"Simply" a matter of adding paths and a timer. Yeah right.

Avigail Snir, a teacher from Illinois showed a great example of
exploring the modeling of gravity based on a simple basketball
simulation. A remarkable thing was her use of a "book" to show the
progress of her thinking along the path to discovery – the closest to
a "lab notebook" as I have seen with Etoys (or any other learning
program, for that matter). Lots more at
[http://www.etoysillinois.org/].

Mahnaz Moallem talked about the challenges of making a transition from
a well-defined, one best answer, discourage making mistakes classroom
into an ill-defined, many answers, making mistakes and developing
problem-solving skills classroom. She and her colleagues use extensive
use of scaffolding and guiding to help kids stay motivated. Etoys
"Flaps" are used for documenting what the kids have done. The
consensus among North Carolina teachers at the conference is that
there is terrible constraint in the schools in terms of
tightly-scheduled problem-based requirements imposed on the teachers.

Chandra Roughton posed a tough question: "Is this a model or is it
[just] a visualization?" Etoys teachers think and do and demand a lot
of each other and their students. What a breath of fresh air.

===In the community===

2. There is a new and improved website describing teacher resources
(in Spanish) here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Recursos_en_espanol

3. There will be a Turtle Art Day at the Arlington Career Center in
Arlington Virginia on 7 August.

===Sugar Labs===

Gary Martin has generated SOMs from the past few weeks of discussion
on the IAEP mailing list.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2010-July-10-16-som.jpg
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:2010-July-17-23-som.jpg

Visit our [http://planet.sugarlabs.org planet] for more updates about
Sugar and Sugar deployments.

-walter
-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org