[IAEP] Future Direction

[Sora Edwards-Thro]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 6:49 PM, Gonzalo Odiard <godiard at sugarlabs.org>
wrote:

> We see that all time, is not surprising at all.
> Some (but not all) kids will try until find the way,
> and many adults are used to a more structured way of learning,
> and are afraid of "break something".
>

Everyone's capable of thinking critically and being creative, but not in
the same ways. Within a class of 20 kids, you'll get maybe 3 max who can
figure e-Toys out on their own (in our experience, working with 4th - 6th
graders in Haiti). Then there's another kid in the class who's good at
writing, another who's good at playing music, another who's a natural
leader, and so on...people have different talents. In the developing world,
there are kids who can figure out e-Toys on their own but in my experience
the whole class of kids will not do that - maybe because it does not come
naturally to them, maybe because they are not as interested in it, who
knows?

A good teacher will be able to guide the kids who are not excited about the
software itself so that they can make something exciting with it. I agree,
Gonzalo, that adults in general want more structure than kids. But another
part of why teachers want a manual is so they can give their students
advice on how to do specific things. A kid raises their hand with a
question about how to do something; you want to be able to give them the
answer.

The materials that have already been created for e-Toys are great and we've
used them. And it's not like things are that hard to do once you've
learned. But just the way the menus work, the number of clicks it takes to
get to something cool is unfortunately too many in a lot of cases. That's
if you're looking to teach a class of 20 students at once, and you also
want to teach other things besides e-Toys. Different models (targeting only
advanced students, letting the kids play around on their own over months of
time) would work differently.

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 5:04 PM, Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Interesting that 5th graders learn Etoys very easily but teachers find
>> "the learning curve too steep" hmmmmmm
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Alan
>>
>>   ------------------------------
>>  *From:* Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>
>> *To:* Caryl Bigenho <cbigenho at hotmail.com>
>> *Cc:* IAEP SugarLabs <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>; Tim Falconer <
>> timothy at immuexa.com>; "support-gang at laptop.org" <support-gang at laptop.org>
>>
>> *Sent:* Wednesday, March 4, 2015 11:57 AM
>>
>> *Subject:* Re: [IAEP] Future Direction
>>
>> 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/
>>
>> 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)!
>>
>>
>> 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
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>> - 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
>>
>>
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>>
>>
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>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Gonzalo Odiard
>
> SugarLabs - Software for children learning
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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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