Gary Chambers released new UI Enhancements for Squeak. You can now access these changes from the Squeak Source Repository or through Package Universes. You can read more by following the following threads here and here. Also check out the new UI team. Our thanks to Gary and the UI Team!!
From: Michael Haupt,
The German/Swiss/Austrian TV station 3sat has a weekly 30-minute show called “neues” (roughly translated “new things”) which deals with IT-related information. Yesterday’s show was focusing on bringing IT to isolated regions and emerging nations as well as developing countries. The show featured an article on mesh networks in Ecuador and the Linux4Africa project.
Linux4Africa is a German project collecting old but functional hardware. The components are cleaned, repaired (if necessary), bestowed with an Edubuntu Linux installation, and sent to Tanzania and Moçambique.
12 of the show’s 30 minutes were dedicated to an extensive coverage of the OLPC project. Etoys and Squeak were mentioned several times during the feature. The project itself was introduced, and Bert Freudenberg was interviewed about the technical features of the XO laptop, which was presented in detail.
There were also two interviews in the studio. Two members of GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit; German Society for Technical Cooperation) responsible for XO distribution in Ethiopia talked about the project in general and about the impressive progress children made when working with the XO.
The other interview – which filled the first slot in the OLPC coverage – featured two students from Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, who have developed strategic and skill-improving games for the XO in the Software Architecture Group‘s course on software architectures.
All in all, the editorial staff at 3sat did a tremendous job in preparing this show. To the writer’s knowledge, this was the first time the OLPC project was presented at such a level of detail in German television. Germany being a country where the the project has no actual lobby, it is important to have such media coverage – it would be nice to see much, much more of it.
The entire show can be watched online (in German).
Smallthought Systems, the authors of the Seaside-based online spreadsheet app Dabble dB, have a brand new application for the Facebook crowd: Dabble Do (no relation to Fred Flintstone, but “Yabba Dabble Do!” could be their tagline!)
ToDo Lists are aplenty, but this one has a couple of neat features. Instead of a calendar popping up, the user can simply write: “tomorrow” or “next Wednesday” (although I did find a bug when entering “next wednesday”. The icon displayed “this week” instead of “next week”.) Another interesting feature is assigning events for your friends. You simply type your friend’s name, assign a task to him and press “Do it!”. I don’t know how this will pan out, but it will be interesting to track how friends bang on each other. It could prove to be a fun way for friends to communicate with one another.
If you’re a Facebook user, it’s worth checking out!
More about Dabble Do:
Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called $100 laptop is poised to go into mass production. Check out the BBC Article.
From Kim Rose, Viewpoints Research Institute:
Greetings —
Online registration is now available for SqueakFest ’07!
http://imamp.colum.edu/eceim/squeakfest07/index.php
We’re putting together a great three day program including hands-on workshops, panels, presentations, casual sharing time and fun social events.
Alan Kay will give a talk about the One Laptop Per Child Initiative, the “xo” machine and Squeak Etoys on this platform.
Registration for the entire program is $125.00. Please register
early as this will be helpful for our planning. We also encourage
you to BOOK YOUR HOTEL ROOM(s) EARLY! Chicago will host numerous summer events and hotels are already near capacity for August 1-3.
Some suggested accomodations appear on the SqueakFest website:
http://imamp.colum.edu/eceim/squeakfest07/accommodations.php
Please forward this email to anyone you know that may be interested in attending.
Come join us in Chicago! We look forward to seeing you there.
cheers,
Kim
Antonio Moreno just let us know of this Youtube video featuring a demonstration of Squeak use in education. The demo, taken at the Salón de la Educación 2007, shows Randall Caton explaining to teachers, students and politicians how he uses Squeak with his students as part of the Nasa Connect program.
You know what they say, “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the laptop for the worlds children business!” Pictured above is the OLPC computer running day and night (look closely and notice the Squeak E-Toys running) at scorching temperatures 52C (125F) during the day time and 22C (72F) at night. Just image running your computer laptop in an oven all day!
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has been recently interviewed by the Economist magazine. Amongst the many topics covered in the interview, Shuttleworth also talked about Croquet and how Canonical (Shuttleworth’s company) uses it for planning and building Ubuntu:
One area where he sees this happening is in real-time collaboration. E-mail is widely used as a collaborative tool, but has severe limitations. When a team, such as a group of software developers, wants to work together on something in real time, something more elaborate is needed. Mr Shuttleworth points to an open-source platform called Croquet, an immersive environment that is similar in many ways to Second Life, a popular online virtual world. “You can see your collaborators’ avatars looking at a spreadsheet in a virtual room,” he says. “People change things in different colours—newer stuff glows. We’ve started to use this for planning and building Ubuntu.”
Canonical, which is based in London where Mr Shuttleworth now lives, cannot afford to pay for all its programmers to come to planning meetings for new versions of the software, which are held every six months. Rather than demote some participants to a “second class” of virtual participation, he would prefer to have everyone participate virtually.
You may find the whole interview here.
The University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) has published the following press release:
Wilmington, N.C. – While demand for Information Technology (IT) professionals is projected to increase over the next five years, a dwindling number of American students are choosing to specialize in IT fields. Now, a grant-funded partnership between the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the New Hanover, Pender and Brunswick County schools is addressing that issue by infusing IT skills into the curriculum in grades 7-12.
[…]
The three-year-long project will work directly with about 75 educators who teach the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) curricula and 150 of their students in grades 7-12. Teachers and students will learn to use “Squeak” software to create virtual models that simulate actual science and math-related experiments. For example, students could create a computer model to study the transmission of a disease, an activity that could be too dangerous to study in a physical laboratory.
“It may be difficult to study the spread of a virus for real in middle school,” said Gene Tagliarini, associate professor of computer science and grant coordinator. “But you can simulate an epidemic using the Squeak tool, which can create models to study things as abstract as balancing equations or as concrete as building a bridge.”
[…]
You can read the complete press release on the UNCW website.
The Weekly Squeak 