[IAEP] Future Direction

[Caryl Bigenho]

Hi...
Some thoughts about Etoys:   Tim Falconer and other folks at Waveplace (deployments around the Caribbean) have made excellent use of Etoys and have made a series of lessons about its use available at:
http://www.waveplace.com/courseware/basic-etoys/


However, I don't recall seeing anywhere that they use many other parts of Sugar with the students. So the question could become: does Etoys need to be "packaged" with Sugar. 


Something to consider in answering the question is that Etoys is available in a very portable version as "Etoys to Go": http://www.squeakland.org/download/  One nice feature about Etoys To Go is that you can put it on a thumb drive and move it from a Linux machine to a Windows machine to a Mac machine and the files will all be readable and usable! Also, it leaves nothing behind on the host machine. It is all on the usb drive!


We can thank Bert Freudenberg for that! I'm adding him to this conversation so he might be able to give us an update on the latest news from Etoys… is a version for Android and/or IOS coming that would also be as portable as the current Etoys To Go? Universal portability would be a wonderful goal (for Sugar too)!


Personally, like Sora, I have found the Etoys learning curve a bit steep. Once I did a workshop about Etoys To Go for a roomful of tech-saavy teachers. They just really didn't get it.  I also tried to contribute to a project where some folks were making some science lessons in Etoys… but found it really difficult to get it to do what I wanted it too. 


Yet,  my favorite little ecology simulation is an Etoys featured project "Fish And Plankton". It is great fun to experiment with and can teach some powerful lessons! http://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7303 Try letting it run overnight with different starting parameters and see what happens…. fun!
Caryl
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2015 13:43:01 -0300
From: godiard at sugarlabs.org
To: sora at unleashkids.org
CC: iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org; tkkang at nurturingasia.com; tony_anderson at usa.net
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Future Direction

 If we abandon etoys to maintain compatibility with
    Fedora, what has the end-user gained?
We (SugarLabs) don't abandon etoys to maintain compatibility with Fedora.Fedora request a change on etoys, but Bert (who maintains etoys) is working for free,then we can't force him to dedicate hours to work on that.  Would a GSOC effort be better devoted to moving from Scratch 1 to Scratch 2 than rewriting imageviewer?
I don't know. Scratch 2 use Flash and need Adobe Air, then we need check how works in the XOs.I have read Scratch team is working in HTML5 version, that would be great.
About rewrite imageviewer, if we want allow use Sugar to kids without XOs,we need move forward to HTML5/Js. Maybe Image Viewer is not a prioritary activity,but is a good task to introduce developers because is relatively easy.
Anyway the proposed tasks for GSoC are only a start, you can propose other, and we will need do a selectionwhen Google define how many projects will fund.
Gonzalo 



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