Mittwoch, 22. September 2010

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!

Dienstag, 7. September 2010

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.

Freitag, 3. September 2010

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