Squeakland week

These were the last two weeks:

#1. Uruguay is now the country with the most registered Etoys users in the world. Congratulations!

#2. Tim Falconer started a discussion "A school is not a building" on several lists, even on the developer chat on Monday this was the topic. [1], [2]

#3. We tested the next environments for online collaboration on the education team meetings. This time it was Skype and GoToMeeting. With Skype, the screen sharing didn't work. This week in GoToMeeting we had an audio chat and could share our screens, so this is working well. It was fun to show each other projects and play around! [3]

#4. Carlos Rabassa did send his notes from the "Digital Citizenship" conference he attended in Montevideo, with detailed feedback for individual presentations. [4]

#5. And here is a nice website with ideas for mathematical doodling, have a look and start your next Etoys project :) [5]

Fun with pattern blogs and transformation tools

Read this great blog from Steve!
http://mrstevesscience.blogspot.com

New chapter in Physics FlexBook using Etoys!

Today, I saw this article about a new chapter for a NASA physics FlexBook:


http://www.itnewsonline.com/showprnstory.php?storyid=120290

The chapter called "Modeling and Simulating NASA's Launch Abort System" has been written by Randy Caton, an active member of the Squeakland education team and board. You can find it here:


http://www.ck12.org/flexr/chapter/7847

Enjoy!

book sprint - day 1

When we made the plan, I didn't realize that the first day of our book sprint is labor day! So there was time for a thorough inventory. What do we have so far? I used the time to go over every chapter and put notes and comments in chapter talk of the particular chapter. If you login to FlossManuals, you'll know what I mean.
In order to get finished, we need to cut back on some things. Put everything in we need and leave out the nice-to-have stuff. This will of course not be deleted, but put into appendices or other files for later use.
One convention we agreed on was to base the manual on Etoys 4.0. I think this should still be the case, and we should add notes for the changes in the new Etoys 4.1 version.

Etoys reference manual

We will have a book sprint next week to hopefully finish the Etoys reference manual in time for the next release. A book sprint is usually held in some place, where the participants meet face-to-face and spend a weekend or rather a week writing a book.
Unfortunately, we cannot have the physical meeting, but we can do it online. We are using FLOSS Manuals, a web-based tool for collaborative writing. Since we started last December, we already have gained some experience. I like the tool! It will get more interesting when it comes to the design of the pages and cover. Right now, my biggest problem is to find a good structure for the book. It needs to have numbered chapters and sub-chapters to give the reader the context, but on the other hand, too much numbering (like 2.1.3.4.5) isn't help anymore. So we need to find a good balance. Fortunately, with FLOSS Manuals, the layout is made using css, so we don't need to worry about the design yet and can just write.
We have a wiki page with more information about the book sprint here:
http://wiki.squeakland.org/display/sq/Book+Sprint

Etoys is a modeling tool

Mark Guzdial cites Adele Goldberg in his blog today, emphasizing, that the focus should be on "modeling" instead of "programming". I think this is exactly what Etoys is made for. Not to learn how to program, but as a tool to be able to model a real world phenomenon.  Read more in his blog:

http://computinged.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/adele-goldberg-modeling-not-programming/

You can also get the book Points of View: A Tribute to Alan Kay here:


http://vpri.org/pov/

Squeak Etoys on the iPad

Bert has ported Etoys on the iPad! Check out in his blog
http://croquetweak.blogspot.com/2010/06/squeak-etoys-on-ipad.html

Squeak Etoys demonstrated on Classmate, OLPC, and iPad at LinuxTag Berlin

Yes, I can post too.
kh

Test

Yes, I can post, too.

Dear friends,

this is the first try with Google blogs for Squeakland.

Rita