Develop activity [was Re: [sugar] Education?]

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Mar 10, 2007, at 8:10 , Andrew Clunis wrote:

> One thing that does bother me about hacking within a running  
> instance of
> a program is that people might get sloppy about the state of their
> program; they'll be coding against state produced by their earlier  
> code,
> including buggy stuff they deleted or changed. Perhaps I misunderstand
> somehow and someone can refute this?

I guess this is new territory, not sure to which extent this has been  
tried in Python yet. There was talk about this some time ago on the  
edu-sig list, which was resumed because of Guido's xreload:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2007-February/007794.html

> I think, for gen1 at least, that Develop should focus on older  
> children
> and hackers writing Activities, and eToys should focus on providing a
> learning environment for the youngest children.
>
> That isn't necessarily ideal, but it is certainly the most realistic
> target.  That doesn't mean that Develop won't learn as many lessons  
> from
> etoys as it can, and perhaps ultimately do what eToys does now for the
> young kids.

I'm looking forward to see how this pans out :)

>>>>> ow this may or may not be an issue to people(OLPC devs, students,
>>>>>  teacers), they may or may not care, but it is an interesting  
>>>>> 'world
>>>>>  inside a world' for this transparent learning machine we are
>>>>>  developing.
>
> This is an important distinction to make.  Develop has to deal with  
> the
> real world (at least within the context of the XO), whereas eToys has
> the benefit of being self-contained.

OTOH, the whole idea of developing a new environment (Sugar) is  
precisely to make a world where kids can explore freely. There  
shouldn't be any artificial limit of what you can do in there.

- Bert -