Re: [IAEP] First day of Etoys class in Somerville

Report is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z2wFRkZPOxKpREA6sV1-XVdxjm7bC9jP50KWkdL6d64/edit?authkey=CP7cjcgL&hl=en#

We are working in a computer lab in a housing project in Somerville run by the Haitain Coalition of Somerville.  We are using etoys to start with to help support collaboration between Waveplace and the Somerville Haitian Coalition.  The students did very impressive work for the first day.

We are using E-toys on a USB stick that works on both PC and Linux and hopefully mac in a day or two. The goal is to have it also automatically backup to dropbox. This currently works on XP, hopefully ubuntu will be next.

We could use help from E-toys users. I have a bunch of how do I do this in E-toys questions in the report.

We could use help in writing the backup script for ubuntu.

Check out the report. It has nice screen shots. :)

Thanks,

Caroline

--
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
[hidden email]

<a href="tel:617-500-3488" target="_blank">617-500-3488 - Office
<a href="tel:505-213-3268" target="_blank">505-213-3268 - Fax

_______________________________________________
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
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On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 10:22 PM, Steve Thomas <[hidden email]> wrote:

Caroline,

Your students asked:

Etoys questions include:

1. How do we make a mouth that moves?

When you first open Etoys click on the "Gallery of Projects" then in the second row, first item from the left is a "Bouncing Ball Animation" basically it behaves like flip animation (where you draw the different positions on the edge of each piece of paper and flip through the pages to animate). Have the kids make different drawings of the mouth and place each one in a Holder. Then open the Holder's viewer go to the collections category and you can iterate through the items in the Holder and set the Mouth graphic to the "Holder's player at cursor graphic" To get the "Holder's player at cursor graphic" tile you need to click on the

Sorry, I didn't finish the previous sentence (plus there is a simpler method, from the Mouth's viewer, in the graphics category is a scripting tile "mouth | looks like | dot"  drag that onto the world to create script, the from the Holder's viewer category "collections" drag the "Holder's | player at cursor" tile on top of the "dot" in the "mouth | looks like | dot"  scripting tile. The scripting tile will then look like "mouth | looks like | Holder's player at cursor".  I have been playing with Etoys for a long time and this is the first time I noticed this method of setting a player's costume.   Learn something new everyday ;)

Stephen

Etoys Minutes and more info at http://mrstevesscience.blogspot.com/

Well, the Right Thing according to the Squeak philosophy would of course be implementing your backup in Squeak. E.g., when Etoys was tested in schools a couple years ago, it was set up to store projects on a server with one directory per child.

OTOH the Right Thing is not always the Easiest or Simplest, so I can see why you would want to use an existing backup program. It's a trade-off :)

- Bert -

On 05.04.2011, at 15:42, Derek Redfern wrote:

Thanks for the feedback. 

The other reason we're using Java is so that we can automatically start a backup program whenever eToys is running (autorun is no longer supported on UYou may recall from Episode IV that R2 was carrying some important files destined for delivery to Obi-Wan. These files were, of course, a distress message from Princess Leia and plans for the Empire's newly operational battle station. These plans played a critical part in the successful destruction of the Death Star. If you want to be a hero, just like R2, then we suggest you carry your files on this USB Memory Watch.

SB devices). If anyone has any ideas on how to accomplish this without the use of Java, that would be great. 

Derek

On Apr 5, 2011, at 9:01, Bert Freudenberg <[hidden email]> wrote:

If there was a single way to launch an application that worked flawlessly on all platforms, we certainly would have used it for Etoys-To-Go. Unfortunately, there isn't - and Java is not a solution either, as you discovered, contrary to all marketing.

IMHO it's best to just tell the kids which icon to double-click on their machine. They'll do fine ;)

That said, it's great to hear you're teaching Etoys :)

- Bert -

On 05.04.2011, at 05:54, Derek Redfern wrote:

My apologies - I replied to this, but was not signed on to all the lists so I think my message got rejected.

It's part of a custom system we have set up for ease of use. We want people to be able to just execute a single file for any system, so we wrote a jar file to detect the OS and start the proper Etoys executable accordingly.

For clarification - I'm working with Caroline on the Somerville project.

Thanks!

Derek

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 23:45, Caryl Bigenho <[hidden email][hidden email]> wrote:

Hi...

I have tested Etoys to go, downloaded from the Squeakland site and found it works fine on PC (Windows) and Mac... even the older Power PC Macs. Nothing special installed.  Just plug in the stick and open it.  Projects totally transferrable between machines.  It is a great resource.

Caryl

---

Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2011 22:53:36 -0400
From: [hidden email][hidden email]
To: [hidden email][hidden email]
CC: [hidden email][hidden email]; [hidden email][hidden email]; [hidden email][hidden email]; [hidden email][hidden email]
Subject: Re: [IAEP] First day of Etoys class in Somerville

Caroline,

You also mentioned that:

Etoys on a stick only works when java is installed on the computer.  Several of the computers did not have java and no one knows the admin password to install it.

This seems really strange, are you running Etoys inside a browser?

Stephen 

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 10:49 PM, Steve Thomas <[hidden email][hidden email]> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 10:22 PM, Steve Thomas <[hidden email][hidden email]> wrote:

Caroline,

Your students asked:

Etoys questions include:

1. How do we make a mouth that moves?

When you first open Etoys click on the "Gallery of Projects" then in the second row, first item from the left is a "Bouncing Ball Animation" basically it behaves like flip animation (where you draw the different positions on the edge of each piece of paper and flip through the pages to animate). Have the kids make different drawings of the mouth and place each one in a Holder. Then open the Holder's viewer go to the collections category and you can iterate through the items in the Holder and set the Mouth graphic to the "Holder's player at cursor graphic" To get the "Holder's player at cursor graphic" tile you need to click on the

Sorry, I didn't finish the previous sentence (plus there is a simpler method, from the Mouth's viewer, in the graphics category is a scripting tile "mouth | looks like | dot"  drag that onto the world to create script, the from the Holder's viewer category "collections" drag the "Holder's | player at cursor" tile on top of the "dot" in the "mouth | looks like | dot"  scripting tile. The scripting tile will then look like "mouth | looks like | Holder's player at cursor".  I have been playing with Etoys for a long time and this is the first time I noticed this method of setting a player's costume.   Learn something new everyday ;)

Stephen

Etoys Minutes and more info at http://mrstevesscience.blogspot.com/

_______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [hidden email][hidden email] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep

_______________________________________________
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
[hidden email][hidden email]
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep

Thanks Thomas thats incredibly helpful and I'll try these out tomorrow.

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 10:22 PM, Steve Thomas <[hidden email]> wrote:

Caroline,

Your students asked:

Etoys questions include:

1. How do we make a mouth that moves?

When you first open Etoys click on the "Gallery of Projects" then in the second row, first item from the left is a "Bouncing Ball Animation" basically it behaves like flip animation (where you draw the different positions on the edge of each piece of paper and flip through the pages to animate). Have the kids make different drawings of the mouth and place each one in a Holder. Then open the Holder's viewer go to the collections category and you can iterate through the items in the Holder and set the Mouth graphic to the "Holder's player at cursor graphic" To get the "Holder's player at cursor graphic" tile you need to click on the

• How do you control the placement of a speech/thought bubble.  One girl made a very large heart with a face and the speech bubble appeared right at the top, it would look much better if it were over on the side and closer to the mouth.  But I don’t see how to control how it is positioned.

Unfortunately you can not control the placement. What you could do is grab an image of the speech bubble and move the grabbed image to a different spot.

• How do you make moving eyes (from the object catalog)part of an object so when you move the object with a script the eyes move too?

If you place the eyes on top of the object you want to embed them in, then get the halo for the eye and click on the menu icon (top row, second from left), then select "embed" and choose the name of the object you want to embed them in. OR get the Halo of the item to which you want to add eyes then from the menu icon enure "accept drops" is checked. Now anything you place on that object will be embedded in it. NOTE: you may want to turn off "accept drops" once done, also if you move an object (using the move icon, instead of the pick up icon from the Halo, it will not embed).

• How do I control when a speech bubble appears and disappears.  I seemed to be able to get it to appear fairly easily with the various options in the script but it then seemed to disappear again immediately.

Hmmm, can you share an actual project when this happens? Usually to get a speech bubble to disappear I use the "stop saying or thinking" tile. not sure why it would disappear otherwise.

I'll try and post an Etoys minute some time tomorrow night to show how these things can be done.

Stephen

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 9:46 PM, Caroline Meeks <[hidden email]> wrote:

Report is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z2wFRkZPOxKpREA6sV1-XVdxjm7bC9jP50KWkdL6d64/edit?authkey=CP7cjcgL&hl=en#

We are working in a computer lab in a housing project in Somerville run by the Haitain Coalition of Somerville.  We are using etoys to start with to help support collaboration between Waveplace and the Somerville Haitian Coalition.  The students did very impressive work for the first day.

We are using E-toys on a USB stick that works on both PC and Linux and hopefully mac in a day or two. The goal is to have it also automatically backup to dropbox. This currently works on XP, hopefully ubuntu will be next.

We could use help from E-toys users. I have a bunch of how do I do this in E-toys questions in the report.

We could use help in writing the backup script for ubuntu.

Check out the report. It has nice screen shots. :)

Thanks,

Caroline

--
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
[hidden email]

<a href="tel:617-500-3488" target="_blank">617-500-3488 - Office
<a href="tel:505-213-3268" target="_blank">505-213-3268 - Fax

_______________________________________________
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
[hidden email]
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep

--
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
[hidden email]

<a href="tel:617-500-3488" value="+16175003488" target="_blank">617-500-3488 - Office
<a href="tel:505-213-3268" value="+15052133268" target="_blank">505-213-3268 - Fax