Etoys for touch screens

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Etoys for touch screens

Harness, Kathleen
Good Morning All,
The link is to a set of Etoys projects for the Orpheum Children's Science Museum in Champaign,Illinois. http://etoysillinois.org/library?tags=At%20the%20Orpheum

The director asked that the projects be made for very young visitors to play with independently using the smart board in the museum's lobby. Perhaps you might find a use for these projects too. I would welcome comments and suggestions if you try them with children.
Regards,
Kathleen

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Re: Etoys for touch screens

Steve Thomas
Wonderful (as usual).

I love the idea of using these on a Smartboard where kids can play with them and everyone can see.

Some ideas:
1) For Pencil Art - Allow the kids to:
  1. Modify the colors in the pencil
  2. See and change the script values so they can see how changing the numbers make different designs
2) For Red Rim/Orpheum Puzzel (and any Tanagrams in general)
  1. Allow the kids to rotate and flip the objects
  2. Allow the kids to create their own tanagrams (this might be better at a touch screen station where kids can build and share their projects - which get posted to the Museam Lobby with appropriate credit and a picture of the kid who created it).

Really great stuff,
Thanks for sharing,
Stephen


On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 9:37 AM, Harness, Kathleen <[hidden email]> wrote:
Good Morning All,
The link is to a set of Etoys projects for the Orpheum Children's Science Museum in Champaign,Illinois. http://etoysillinois.org/library?tags=At%20the%20Orpheum

The director asked that the projects be made for very young visitors to play with independently using the smart board in the museum's lobby. Perhaps you might find a use for these projects too. I would welcome comments and suggestions if you try them with children.
Regards,
Kathleen

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Re: Etoys for touch screens

Steve Thomas
Okay one more idea, hook it up to a Makey Makey and have kids "Draw their own controllers" Where they can use pencil and pager to make their own game/drawing controls.

Stephen

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 1:15 PM, Steve Thomas <[hidden email]> wrote:
Wonderful (as usual).

I love the idea of using these on a Smartboard where kids can play with them and everyone can see.

Some ideas:
1) For Pencil Art - Allow the kids to:
  1. Modify the colors in the pencil
  2. See and change the script values so they can see how changing the numbers make different designs
2) For Red Rim/Orpheum Puzzel (and any Tanagrams in general)
  1. Allow the kids to rotate and flip the objects
  2. Allow the kids to create their own tanagrams (this might be better at a touch screen station where kids can build and share their projects - which get posted to the Museam Lobby with appropriate credit and a picture of the kid who created it).

Really great stuff,
Thanks for sharing,
Stephen


On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 9:37 AM, Harness, Kathleen <[hidden email]> wrote:
Good Morning All,
The link is to a set of Etoys projects for the Orpheum Children's Science Museum in Champaign,Illinois. http://etoysillinois.org/library?tags=At%20the%20Orpheum

The director asked that the projects be made for very young visitors to play with independently using the smart board in the museum's lobby. Perhaps you might find a use for these projects too. I would welcome comments and suggestions if you try them with children.
Regards,
Kathleen

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[hidden email]
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Re: Etoys for touch screens

K K Subbu
In reply to this post by Harness, Kathleen
On Thursday 11 Oct 2012 1:37:15 PM Harness, Kathleen wrote:
> Good Morning All,
> The link is to a set of Etoys projects for the Orpheum Children's Science
> Museum in Champaign,Illinois.
> http://etoysillinois.org/library?tags=At%20the%20Orpheum
>
> The director asked that the projects be made for very young visitors to play
> with independently using the smart board in the museum's lobby. Perhaps you
> might find a use for these projects too. I would welcome comments and
> suggestions if you try them with children. Regards,
Nice projects!

You state 'very young visitors'. I would expect such kids to explore
interaction through voice. You could have projects that use sound attributes
(e.g. pitch - move, volume - turn) from the world menu to control movement. I
am sure there are folks in this mailing list who can come up with suitable
computations to detect noise, applause, sighs, yelps and whistling. It won't
be long before the kids learn to whistle tunes ;-).

Regards .. Subbu
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Re: Etoys for touch screens

Harness, Kathleen
In reply to this post by Steve Thomas
Steve,
Thanks for your comments and suggestions.

It was fun to make these projects for the museum. The director will be teaching her staff how to open these projects from the flash drive with Etoys-to-Go. Maybe they will want to learn some Etoys so they could go deeper into it as one of the museum offerings. At this time, children will not be authors but rather use the projects more like an app.

For the future, we are piloting Etoys in three local middle schools so we might have a cadre of teenagers who could volunteer there and then all kinds of new projects will be added.

Have you tried the Makey Makey? I plan to order one.
Kathleen

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] on behalf of Steve Thomas [[hidden email]]
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2012 12:16 PM
To: Harness, Kathleen
Cc: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [squeakland] Etoys for touch screens

Okay one more idea, hook it up to a Makey Makey and have kids "Draw their own controllers" Where they can use pencil and pager to make their own game/drawing controls.

Stephen

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 1:15 PM, Steve Thomas <[hidden email]> wrote:
Wonderful (as usual).

I love the idea of using these on a Smartboard where kids can play with them and everyone can see.

Some ideas:
1) For Pencil Art - Allow the kids to:
  1. Modify the colors in the pencil
  2. See and change the script values so they can see how changing the numbers make different designs
2) For Red Rim/Orpheum Puzzel (and any Tanagrams in general)
  1. Allow the kids to rotate and flip the objects
  2. Allow the kids to create their own tanagrams (this might be better at a touch screen station where kids can build and share their projects - which get posted to the Museam Lobby with appropriate credit and a picture of the kid who created it).

Really great stuff,
Thanks for sharing,
Stephen


On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 9:37 AM, Harness, Kathleen <[hidden email]> wrote:
Good Morning All,
The link is to a set of Etoys projects for the Orpheum Children's Science Museum in Champaign,Illinois. http://etoysillinois.org/library?tags=At%20the%20Orpheum

The director asked that the projects be made for very young visitors to play with independently using the smart board in the museum's lobby. Perhaps you might find a use for these projects too. I would welcome comments and suggestions if you try them with children.
Regards,
Kathleen

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http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland




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Re: Etoys for touch screens

Harness, Kathleen
In reply to this post by K K Subbu
Subbu,
What a great a idea! I know kids would love move shapes with their voice. Wait, I would love to move shapes with my voice!

The museum director said to focus on ages 4-8 for these projects. You might have noticed how low on the screen most of the things are. It is because they have a raised platform in front of the smart board and even with that, the youngest children can't reach much above the halfway mark.

It was a different kind of project for me to design where I would not be there to help and where the project had to be pretty much self explanatory and sturdy. They are breakable but seemed to be resilient enough to be used by kids who had no instructions at all and just could explore a nice place and see what happens. I will let you know after a few months of use how director evaluates Etoys.
Regards,
Kathleen
________________________________________
From: K. K. Subramaniam [[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, October 12, 2012 2:19 AM
To: [hidden email]
Cc: Harness, Kathleen
Subject: Re: [squeakland] Etoys for touch screens

On Thursday 11 Oct 2012 1:37:15 PM Harness, Kathleen wrote:
> Good Morning All,
> The link is to a set of Etoys projects for the Orpheum Children's Science
> Museum in Champaign,Illinois.
> http://etoysillinois.org/library?tags=At%20the%20Orpheum
>
> The director asked that the projects be made for very young visitors to play
> with independently using the smart board in the museum's lobby. Perhaps you
> might find a use for these projects too. I would welcome comments and
> suggestions if you try them with children. Regards,
Nice projects!

You state 'very young visitors'. I would expect such kids to explore
interaction through voice. You could have projects that use sound attributes
(e.g. pitch - move, volume - turn) from the world menu to control movement. I
am sure there are folks in this mailing list who can come up with suitable
computations to detect noise, applause, sighs, yelps and whistling. It won't
be long before the kids learn to whistle tunes ;-).

Regards .. Subbu
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Re: Etoys for touch screens

K K Subbu
On Friday 12 Oct 2012 11:19:56 AM Harness, Kathleen wrote:
> RE: [squeakland] Etoys for touch screens
> From: "Harness, Kathleen" <[hidden email]>
> To: "K. K. Subramaniam" <[hidden email]>, "[hidden email]"
> <[hidden email]> Subbu,
> What a great a idea! I know kids would love move shapes with their voice.
> Wait, I would love to move shapes with my voice!

Just after shooting of my earlier mail, I saw this talk on TED:

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_maeda_how_art_technology_and_design_inform_creative_leaders.html

Skip to around 7m10s for an interesting use of sound for interaction.

My daughter once created a project to pilot an airplane using voice and tried
it successfully with some neighborhood kids. However, it was too much for a
small home to bear :-(. Anyway she did have lots of fun programming it.

Regards .. Subbu
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