[IAEP] scratch gone missing

[Bill Kerr]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 11:43 PM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>wrote:

>
> On 07.11.2009, at 04:48, Bill Kerr wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 11:35 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org>
> > wrote:
> >> On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 11:10, Bill Kerr <billkerr at 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 -
>
>
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