Great Women in Technology – Dr. Cynthia Solomon
24 April, 2013
Dr. Cynthia Solomon
Cool pictures at: http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r/tasman_turtle_page.htm from bill_r
Great article on the History of Logo.
“If Seymour Papert is the Father of Educational Computing, then Cynthia Soiomon is the Mother of Educational Computing! Not only did Cynthia help create the first programming language for children, but she developed many of the pedagogical approaches and activities we still use to teach children to use computers. Forty five years later, Logo is still in use by millions of children around the world in the form of Scratch, MicroWorlds, Snap! and other dialects. The Twenty Things to Do with a Computer paper written by Solomon and Papert in 1970 or ’71 remains provocative today and lays the foundation for the maker movement sweeping the globe.”
See the full article: Time to Honor a Technology Pioneer!
Computer Environments for Children: A Reflection on Theories of Learning and Education
Designing Multimedia Environments for Children
Wouldn’t it be fun to have the Girls For Raspberry Pi read Twenty Things to Do with a Computer :)
Google Summer of Code 2013
11 April, 2013
So what are you doing this summer?
Dear Students,
Now it is your turn! You will have to register in our website first [1], put there some information, show interest for the projects and contact the project mentors. After the registration step you will get all the mentors information in order to contact them. By pressing the button on the project, you will show your interest. This is not something formal yet.
Of course you can propose your own project too. In this case write a proposal in a format other projects have and send it to admins (see the email on the bottom).
Our mentors will vote for the most interesting projects and in the middle of the voting Google will tell us, how many projects will actually be funded. Voting will happen in May, with final results expected at the end of May. At that time you will finally know if you are accepted or not.
Of course, there can be many students interested per project. This means that interest for this project is high, but on the other side a chance that you will be chosen is lower. It is up to you to convince a mentor that you are the best!
Note also that the Ideas page is deprecated. On ideas page just the project ideas were collected. Now, we are preparing the real projects.
So, please from now on always refer to this link for the projects:
http://gsoc2013.esug.org/projects
So, your initial steps are:
1. Register on our special Smalltalk GSoC website (with
your Google account!):
http://gsoc2013.esug.org/admin?view=loginGoogle
2. Edit your profile to get some more contact information for
mentors to let you know,
3. Fulfill your brief Biography page (see Biography tab on profile),
4. Go to Projects page, choose up to three projects and click there
‘I’m interested’ button,
5. Contact and discuss with project mentors about your interest.
Subscribe also to a special mailing list [2] where we will help you with further steps.
Deadline: as soon as possible, because the deadline to register on official GSoC website [3] is 3.May, which is, well, soon! But about that later…
Finally, we will really appreciate if you can help us to distribute this call for students. One of our goals is to increase the Smalltalk community. Those who have access to universities can distribute this among the students. Distribute also our poster [4] in many languages, English one attached.
[2] Students mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/smalltalk-gsoc-students
[3] Official GSoC website
[4] Poster in PDF and image format, in many languages
http://gsoc2013.esug.org/poster
Good luck!
Janko & Serge
—
GSoC Admin Team
Girls for Rasberry Pi
8 April, 2013
Using Smalltalk Scratch to teach young kids engineering. See girls encouraging girls to get into engineering. See a scratch demo, a Lego Doggie, a blinking pillow, hair lights, a door alarm, backpack break lights and turn signals, then spread the word and follow GirlsForRaspberryPi
Technology for everyone.
New Release of Physical Etoys
6 April, 2013
Hi everybody (and sorry if you receive multiple copies),
It’s been a while since our last version but we’re proud to announce a new release of Physical Etoys.
You can download it from here: http://tecnodacta.com.ar/gira/projects/physical-etoys/
This new version includes:
* Full support for the DuinoBot kit (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1689254125/multiplo-create-your-own-robot).
* New objects such as the Timer and the IR receiver.
* More example projects to help you get started.
* And of course, lots of bug fixes and minor UI enhancements.
All in all, this version is much better than the previous and we hope you would enjoy it as much as we do 
.
Thanks!
Richo
What does the future hold for Pi
27 March, 2013
From BetaNews: (see full article here: What does the future hold for Pi)
BetaNews: What does the future hold for the Pi — new versions?
Liz Upton: The Foundation’s committed to making sure that we don’t suddenly up-sticks and change the platform under people’s feet: the open community has been very good to us, and the last thing we want to do is to make the work they’ve done on the available software redundant. We want to continue selling the Raspberry Pi Model B for a good long time yet; we do have a final hardware revision to make, but the platform will be set in stone after that. We don’t have plans to make a new Pi at the moment; what we are putting a lot of effort into is improving the software stack. We reckon there are orders of magnitude of performance increases we can shake out of Scratch, for example; and this isn’t stuff you can expect the community to do, because it’s a very long and fiddly job. So Scratch, Wayland, Smalltalk: you should see some big improvements coming over this year. We’re also switching a lot of our concentration to our educational mission this year, after a year spent scrambling to get on top of manufacture.
Imagine Invent Inspire – Etoys
25 March, 2013
Don’t miss the new Etoys book: http://wiki.squeakland.org/index.php/LearningWithEtoysI3.
Etoys is:
- an educational tool for teaching children powerful ideas in compelling ways
- a media-rich authoring environment and visual programming system
- a free software program that works on almost all personal computers
All school children should have the opportunity to engage with computers in the most meaningful way. Learning to think and using the computer to discover and work with powerful ideas is the knowledge of true value. The community of Etoys users is working toward the dream of having all students become computer literate. This book only covers a small portion of those items. As you and your students learn some of the basic techniques, you will find more and more uses for them. The process of learning Etoys is just that, a process; the learning is on-going even though projects are begun and finished. Students will enjoy becoming experts and sharing their knowledge with others in the classroom.
Imagine this: A group of learners want to visualize what they Imagine so they go to Etoys to Invent their dreams and Inspire each other by building on their various Etoys projects. Today’s learners need this kind of experience to be prepared for the future.
For more information about Etoys visit www.squeakland.org
Feeding the Mouse some Pi
19 March, 2013
Tim Rowledge announced:
Squeak 4.0 & 4.4 packages now available for RISC OS (on Raspberry Pi for example) at http://squeakvm.org/riscos
