[IAEP] NewTechHigh at Coppell and Etoys info needed

[Alan Kay]

One of the vocabularies in Etoys from some years ago (and possibly still) was 
Swahili (one of the Etoys builders was in the Peace Corps in Ghana).

I will leave the rest of the info to the Squeakland.org folks.

Cheers,

Alan




________________________________
From: Caryl Bigenho <cbigenho at hotmail.com>
To: IAEP SugarLabs <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>; support-gang at laptop.org; 
SugarLabs Testing <testing at lists.laptop.org>; health-request at lists.laptop.org; 
health waveplace <health at waveplace.org>
Sent: Sat, November 20, 2010 12:19:07 PM
Subject: [IAEP] NewTechHigh at Coppell and Etoys info needed

 Hi Folks,

I had a great visit yesterday with the folks at New Tech High @ Coppell, TX. It 
is a great place, where "facilitators" guide "learners" in their project based 
learning.  We were very impressed. But, I was surprised to discover they do not 
teach any computer programming at the school.  If students want to take 
programming, they can do a concurrent enrollment at the local community college. 
Their classes are the traditional courses, taught in a very non-traditional way.

Since last year they  have been doing a great Contributors Project with  XOs 
they are sending to the rescued slave children at the shelter run by the Touch A 
Life Foundation in Ghana.  As a followup to the work they did last year, they 
want to create math games for these children to use on the XOs.  They tried 
doing this last year with Scratch but were not satisfied with their "product" 
and felt they could do better.

Their project director is a math teacher and she wants her students to try again 
this year to create math learning games for the children in their project in 
Ghana.  I suggested she try Etoys this time and promised to get her more 
information on how to do it.  Anything they create will be at a very elementary 
level as most of the children in the shelter have had no prior school 
experience. Their lessons in Etoys should be as language neutral as possible and 
the words they do use can be translated and used by deployments anywhere so this 
could be a very useful project.

So I have some questions about things I need to know to help them.

How do you transfer an Etoys lesson to the XO (they will have both XO-1s and 
XO-1.5s) if they lessons are created:

On a Mac using Etoys downloaded from the web:

On a PC using Etoys downloaded from the web:

On Etoys to go downloaded from the web and, possibly used on both Macs and PCs 
(they have both at New Tech):

Is there a good way to disseminate the projects so that the children won't 
accidentally erase them... perhaps by using SD cards or USB sticks? Cost is a 
factor.

Or... could they make a custom build for their project that would include their 
Etoys lessons in a way that they wouldn't accidentally be erased?

I will probably have more questions as we go along, but this will help get us 
all started. 

GrannieB (Caryl)

For more info about NewTech at Coppell:

http://www.coppellisd.com/newtech/lib/newtech/pdfs/demonstrationsiteprofile.pdf

http://www.newtechnetwork.org/newtech_schools   (watch the video linked in the 
upper right corner to see how the school works)


      
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