Rita Freudenberg has announced that “The official Squeakfest website is now live and ready for you to propose a presentation, workshop, or panel.”

Squeakfest is an annual conference where developers and users of the Etoys media-rich authoring and experimentation environment (based on Squeak) get together to share ideas, experiences, and their enthusiasms with colleagues from around the world.

This year’s conference will be held at University of North Carolina in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the USA from 26th—28th July, and the theme for will be “Etoys in the STEM classroom.”

The conference will offer an opportunity to reflect on the achievements of the NSF-funded project “Using Squeak to Infuse Technology (USeIT)” which is now reaching its 3rd year.

The team are keen to hear from individuals and groups with experience teaching with Etoys, as well as non-classroom Etoys use, particularly as it relates to OLPC pilots or homeschooling. More information will be added to the website as it becomes available, but the organisers ask presenters to get presentation information to them by completing and submitting the online form no later than 11th June, 2010.

To get a flavour of what to expect at the conference, have a look at our report from last year’s Squeakfest.

Mikael Kindborg and colleagues at comikit.se have announced that their Magic Words application is now available as Open Source software.

Magic Words gives children (of all ages!) the ability to create interactive animated worlds. It has been used to allow its users to make their own friendly non-violent computer games and explore the meaning of words as part of learning how to read.

The team have made the source-code available under the MIT licence, and have provided some sample resources including pictures, text, and sounds to get you started.

The application is of course based on Squeak, and the Comikit team give detailed instructions on how to load it into a standard Squeak image.

The Mid-Hudson Valley Linux User Group will get the opportunity on 4th June to hear about a range of educational tools running on Squeak, including: Seaside, Scratch, Croquet and Etoys. Joe Apuzzo will discuss his experience teaching 60 kids from 3th grade to 5th math and science (all within 15 minutes per group).

Find out more at the website.

The Software Architecture Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (who have produced a great online Seaside tutorial and associated book) have recently been involved in using Etoys in the classroom. They kindly sent us this report about the experience of two of their members when introducing Squeak and Etoys to high school students.

Pupils of the “Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Gymnasium” (high school) in Potsdam, Germany learned about Etoys and the basic principles of programming in a four-day workshop. Under the supervision of two student tutors of the Software Architecture Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (Robert Krahn and Michael Perscheid), the 14- to 16-year-old pupils have implemented their own ideas and games in very short time using Etoys. All of them had no or little prior experience with computers and programming.

On March 25, the workshop started with an introduction to the subject matter. The tutors introduced themselves and provided a first look at Squeak and Etoys. Afterwards, Robert and Michael presented brief tutorials in which the pupils participated. The first tutorial involved drawing a car and letting it drive along a road according to some small scripts. The second tutorial dealt with implementing the Lunar Lander game. For increased fun, the pupils were encouraged to be creative, resulting in a wide variety of car and rocket designs. In the course of implementing the car and lunar lander games, the pupils also faced the problems of adequately modelling physical phenomena, such as gravity, in which process they were guided by the tutors. At the end of the first day, all workshop participants had grown accustomed to the development environment and were well prepared for their own projects.

The second day started with a brief introduction to object orientation, which put the knowledge and experience gathered during the first day in a broader and theoretically founded context. Over the following two days, the pupils worked on their own Etoys projects. The tutors had given some hints as to what kinds of games could be implemented, but the pupils came up with ideas of their own as well. Many beautiful and creative results were produced. Robert and Michael were always available for individually attending to the pupils.

On the final day, participants were asked to present their projects in 10-minute short presentations. Michael gave a brief introduction to presentation techniques, so that the pupils were well prepared for this. Everyone proudly presented their achievements. Although none of the participants had prior knowledge in computer science, they achieved astounding results in short time. As a gift, all participants were given a CD containing all projects and the Etoys environment.

Michael Perscheid, Michael Haupt

Hilaire Fernandes is writing a series of blog posts intended to introduce Squeak to teachers and to developers of educational software. The articles—available in both English and French—are intended to be a gentle introduction to Squeak’s features, and to highlight the ways in which it can be used in education. In each post Hilaire introduces a new topic, and explains its relevance to educational users.

In writing this series of posts, Hilaire is able to draw on many years involvement in developing Free software in education (including Dr Geo II for the OLPC XO), and working with education professionals to incorporate such software into the school curriculum.

The first post gives Squeak’s background and introduces Morphic – English, Français.

The second post is an overview of how images work – English, Français.

Randal L. Schwartz just announced that he will be giving a 3 hour tour of Seaside at OSCON 2008. We are very proud to have Randal on the Squeak Foundation Board. We are looking forward to more of his “Year of Smalltalk“.

[Edit: corrected spelling]

The following was posted to the Squeak-Dev Mailing list by Markus Denker. The quote speaks for itself and it does give one pause to consider the implications to our community. It also strikes me as relevant to a lot of other development communities too. Great ideas are still very powerful and inspiring, but the idea alone is still seen as only half the process. We all know that there is a lot of very interesting problems that arise while we transform our ideas into working code. We also know that it is much easier to build onto a working system, or take what we learned from the process of building a working system to the next generation. While the idea itself can be seen as a great accomplishment, the realization of the idea by itself confers even greater benefits to the community. What projects have you left undone? What’s the difference?

“One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to the celebrated mathematician and inventor, Mr Babbage. He was far advanced in age, but his mind was still as vigorous as ever. He took me through his work-rooms. In the first room I saw parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been shown in an incomplete state many years before and had even been put to some use. I asked him about its present form.
‘I have not finished it because in working at it I came on the idea of my Analytical Machine, which would do all that it was capable of doing and much more. Indeed, the idea was so much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.’”

“After a few minutes’ talk, we went into the next work-room, where he showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see it. ‘I have never completed it,’ he said, ‘because I hit upon an idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines.’ Then we went into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism, but I saw no trace of any working machine. Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received the dreaded answer, ‘It is not constructed yet, but I am working on it, and it will take less time to construct it altogether than it would have token to complete the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.’ I took leave of the old man with a heavy heart.”

– Lord Moulton
–
Marcus Denker http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker

Don’t miss this fun new video from Randal Schwartz and Leo about Squeak, EToys and OLPC.  Randal builds a very nice car demo.

Hi Squeakers,
Enclosed kindly find the information about International Squeak Live Video Conference in Nepal and Japan to be held Feb 28, 2008.  If you are interested to contribute or participate, you are most welcome.

Best regards,
Yogesh Shrestha

International Squeak Live Video Conference (pdf)