[Sugar-devel] [FIELDBACK] Etoys

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 24.02.2010, at 18:12, Simon Schampijer wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am teaching on a regular basis in the Planetarium pilot in Berlin, 
> Germany [1]. I have been using Etoys now for several weeks and here is 
> some first feedback.
> 
> First: The kids do like it a lot! I want to encourage everyone to 
> include it in his curriculum.
> 
> For example you can teach easily the concepts of the coordinate system 
> with Etoys. You create an object and print out the X and Y values when 
> moving it on the screen. Or you can use a joystick to alter the position 
> of this object and use this method to deepen the coordinate system concept.
> 
> Of course we did as well the famous car example. It was slightly changed 
> in my class: A bug has to crawl a lane using one or two sensors to stay 
> on the lane. A lot of interesting concepts to learn here, too (positive 
> and negative numbers for example).
> 
> And to bring this all together into a portfolio you can use the book 
> tool (found in the treasure chest) to create a story including all your 
> objects and games, pictures etc you created.
> 
> I wrote down a few items I was missing when using the book tool and 
> while doing so, I figured they were all there, just hidden by default.
> 
> - resize all of the book not just one page
>    - maybe that could be the default option?
> - duplicate a page
> - different background color
> - different sound when turning the page
> 
> When you hit the little button at the far left you will get more 
> options. And when you use the menu in the middle of the book toolbar you 
> get all of these options and a lot of more. Just in case someone runs as 
> well into this :)
> 
> A few things that I came across, too:
> - German: When you drop the 'joystick up down' and 'joystick left right' 
> option onto the world it will change to English. Not when you use it in 
> a script though.
> - some buttons are hard to use: for example when you want to alter the 
> behavior of the X value of an object (increase..). Those are hard to 
> navigate. Or dropping options into the test script does not work as smooth.
> 
> That's all for now - keep up the good work, team Etoys!.
> 
> Thanks,
>    Simon
> 
> PS: Of course I am happy to turn items into bugs later. Just thought I 
> give here a little summary first.
> 
> 
> [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Deployments/Planetarium


Great! Thanks for writing this up.

It might also be of interest to the IAEP folks, not just us developers ...

- Bert -