[IAEP] Future Direction

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 04.03.2015, at 10:44, Caryl Bigenho <cbigenho at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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/ <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/ <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)!

Supporting all the different platforms natively is too much work given our limited resources. Something that could become the "universal" version is this browser-based version (but that too needs work to optimize performance, and support other browsers than Chrome):

	http://bertfreudenberg.github.io/SqueakJS/etoys/

> 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. 

Yep. Etoys was designed with extensive teacher training in mind, but that training never happened on a large scale. Scratch learned from that lesson, and while as a result it is not as powerful as Etoys, it is much more approachable and discoverable.

Btw, recently Tim Rowledge worked on the ARM version of Squeak for the Raspberry Pi, which both Etoys and Scratch benefit from. That should benefit the XO-4 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 <http://www.squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7303> Try letting it run overnight with different starting parameters and see what happens…. fun!

Yes, that's a nice one. It even works in Etoys/JS (if you can wait long enough for it to finish loading):
http://bertfreudenberg.github.io/SqueakJS/etoys/#fullscreen=true&document=http://freudenbergs.de/bert/squeakjs/FishAndPlankton.017.pr <http://bertfreudenberg.github.io/SqueakJS/etoys/#fullscreen=true&document=http://freudenbergs.de/bert/squeakjs/FishAndPlankton.017.pr>

- Bert -


> 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 selection
> when Google define how many projects will fund.
> 
> Gonzalo 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep




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