[IAEP] [FIELDBACK] Etoys

[Simon Schampijer]

Hi,

I am teaching on a regular basis in the Planetarium pilot in Berlin,
Germany [1]. I have been using Etoys now for several weeks and here is
some first feedback.

First: The kids do like it a lot! I want to encourage everyone to
include it in his curriculum.

For example you can teach easily the concepts of the coordinate system
with Etoys. You create an object and print out the X and Y values when
moving it on the screen. Or you can use a joystick to alter the position
of this object and use this method to deepen the coordinate system concept.

Of course we did as well the famous car example. It was slightly changed
in my class: A bug has to crawl a lane using one or two sensors to stay
on the lane. A lot of interesting concepts to learn here, too (positive
and negative numbers for example).

And to bring this all together into a portfolio you can use the book
tool (found in the treasure chest) to create a story including all your
objects and games, pictures etc you created.

I wrote down a few items I was missing when using the book tool and
while doing so, I figured they were all there, just hidden by default.

- resize all of the book not just one page
     - maybe that could be the default option?
- duplicate a page
- different background color
- different sound when turning the page

When you hit the little button at the far left you will get more
options. And when you use the menu in the middle of the book toolbar you
get all of these options and a lot of more. Just in case someone runs as
well into this :)

A few things that I came across, too:
- German: When you drop the 'joystick up down' and 'joystick left right'
option onto the world it will change to English. Not when you use it in
a script though.
- some buttons are hard to use: for example when you want to alter the
behavior of the X value of an object (increase..). Those are hard to
navigate. Or dropping options into the test script does not work as smooth.

That's all for now - keep up the good work, team Etoys!.

Thanks,
     Simon

PS: Of course I am happy to turn items into bugs later. Just thought I
give here a little summary first.


[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Deployments/Planetarium