[IAEP] Future Direction

[Alan Kay]

Hi 

I agree with your first paragraph (although I don't know of really discoverable programming systems -- even Scratch has lots of conventions that are hard to discover). But I do agree that 5-10% of an population is better matched up to a given topic, and that the rest need more help of different kinds.
But there are good materials for learning Etoys, especially in Spanish, and especially for teachers. 

The last part I don't agree with because it contains a misconception about how to teach Etoys, and especially programming, to children and adults. 

We found -- via many attempts -- that 1 on 1 -- then branching out -- works much much better than trying to teach a group. The "Drive a Car" project was invented to be the introduction, and it can be taught 1 on 1 in about 20 minutes. Now we have two teachers of "Drive a Car". Then 4 etc. It is worth taking the 100 minutes to carry this out. The reason for this approach is found in your first paragraph, and the key is the 1 on 1 which allows the time needed for specific learnings and questions about the project.
Once a class has gotten going, then should eventually be the "first teachers" for the next class, and now the whole new class can be handled in ~30 minutes for the first exercise. This use of "peer teaching" works in other areas also, but it is particularly effective in technique learning. It is not used nearly enough (many pro teachers feel a loss of authority, and that is more important to them that in how well the children are learning).
Cheers
Alan

 
      From: Sora Edwards-Thro <sora at unleashkids.org>
 To: Gonzalo Odiard <godiard at sugarlabs.org> 
Cc: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>; Tim Falconer <timothy at immuexa.com>; IAEP SugarLabs <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>; "support-gang at laptop.org" <support-gang at laptop.org> 
 Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2015 4:18 PM
 Subject: Re: [IAEP] Future Direction
   
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 selectionwhen Google define how many projects will fund.
Gonzalo 

_______________________________________________IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.orghttp://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep 




_______________________________________________
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep

   
 
_______________________________________________
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep




-- 
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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