[Read more →]

I’m proud that we’re offering excellent jobs on our team to programmers in Nepal:

Description: Develop children’s learning activities for the One Laptop Per Child XO using Squeak Smalltalk and Etoys.

Skills:

• Experience with an object-oriented programming language such as Smalltalk, Python, or Ruby.
• Demonstrated ability to write good software quickly.
• Self-motivated, eager to learn new technologies, experienced at working in a team environment.

Preferred:

• Experience with Linux and working on open-source projects.
• Interest in education.

You will quickly learn Squeak Smalltalk programming and Etoys end-user
scripting on the job. You can get a sense of what this is like from
reading our blog and running our demonstration.

[Read more →]

[Read more →]

First on my list for today was to generalise the "highlight on mouseover" code that we use to indicate what’s clickable on the screen (a convention we borrowed from Gcompris). The existing code had a lot of duplication because I’d subclassed a lot of standard graphic objects (Ellipse, Rectangle, Image, etc) to tack on mouseEnter: and mouseLeave: methods to switch the colour scheme. I’d planned to replace this with some fancy pixel-scraping Smalltalk code that’d probably take half a day to write for a relative newbie like me.

Happily I realised this morning that I don’t need to write any Smalltalk at all! I can take any standard geometric object and add a pair of one-line Etoys scripts to switch colours on mouseEnter/mouseLeave. This seems obvious in retrospect but I’ve only recently learned that scripts can be activated automatically on mouse and keyboard events (if you look at the picture closely you’ll see where). I think I picked up this trick from reading Etoys-blogger extraordinaire Bill Kerr’s blog. I’m tempted to praise Bill Kerr as the Bill Clementson of Etoys but perhaps the reference is too Lisp-centric

So anyway: I finished today’s main TODO item before breakfast and celebrated with a leisurely unicycle ride through sunny Patan and into our office. Life is good!

P.S. If you want to join in the Etoys fun at home you should check out the introductory tutorial videos at waveplace.com.

[Read more →]

Currently we are developing different activities using Squeak. One of our main aims is to use simple,efficient and productive methodology. Initially, we have implemented addition activity using complete smalltalk code rather than scripting feature of Etoys . Even though the activities is pretty simple we have to do a lot of manipulation of the squeak’s Morph object. So, this time we have tried to make the same activities without using a single line of code. For the purpose we have used Etoys scripting which is more drag and drop than programming. We are using agile method for the activities development so,iteration is one of the major component of our development process. Initially, it was a long list of scripts. Finally, we came up with the better solution. Now, we have realized that we can do really meaningful things using scripting.

[Read more →]

We’ve been cooking up a development process that we hope will generate lots of Squeak-based learning activities for Nepali classroom use. We want as much of the math, english, and science curriculum as possible to be taught using interactive exercises on the XO so we have to create a lot of content. We also want the OLPC / Squeak community to know what we’re doing so that you have the chance to offer us advice and learn from our mistakes. So here’s an update on our thinking..

The development process is idealised as a pipeline: the educator chooses what to teach (e.g. addition, addition with carry, etc), the designer invents the activity and creates illustrations, the scripter imports the graphics into Squeak and adds most of the dynamic behaviour with Etoys scripts, and then the programmer writes Smalltalk code for anything that couldn’t be done by script.

The artifacts of our development will be:

• One Monticello repository containing our Smalltalk source code. The primary location is currently SqueakSource but we’ll need to establish a low-latency local repository on a server here.
• One Squeak project file (.pr) for each activity. We have a bunch of ways that we want to use these projects that may be somewhat in conflict:
  • Install the bundle of all activities on the XO. This has to be space-efficient: lots of projects will have big images and sound clips in common and we don’t want to duplicate them on disk.
  • Distribute stand-alone activities that can be loaded into the normal XO image.
  • Run individual activities directly from the web.

  We don’t know how to address all of these needs yet and for now we’re focusing on stand-alone projects.

• Some repository for storing our projects (activities). We don’t know yet whether this should be a shared folder, an SVN or GIT repository, a SuperSwiki server, or what else. We’d like to hear how other people work on projects like Demon’s Castle, Etoys Challenge, etc.
• Personal Squeak images used by developers. These will be based on the etoys-dev series but must at least include Monticello. If we can make the images SqueakMap-compatible then each developer can also install their own favourite tools (Refactoring Browser, Whisker, etc). We’d like to hear how other people are doing this.

We’ve been reworking our "Adding Game" to serve as a model activity. First this has meant factoring as much functionality as possible into Etoys scripts. Next we wrote Smalltalk code to extend the Etoys vocabulary so that we have everything necessary for the finished product. The last part is making the project file stand-alone and compatible with the XO Etoys image — in this we’ve only been partly successful up to now.

The steps to load the project are:

1. Start a fresh Squeak using the OLPC XO image.
2. Scale the display to match the XO screen resolution (using the square button on the toolbar at the top of the screen).
3. Download (right click!) the OLE.st source code and drag it into the Squeak window and choose ‘fileIn entire file’.
4. Download (right click!) the AddingGame project file and drag it into the Squeak window to load it.

Then you’ll have a fun little game to play that’s almost entirely written in Etoys tiles!

Good progress but a long way to go yet…

[Read more →]

[Read more →]