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Re: [etoys-dev] Additions to Etoys Reference Manual

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Steve Thomas

Re: [etoys-dev] Additions to Etoys Reference Manual

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 1:24 PM, karl ramberg <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 5:20 PM, Edward Mokurai Cherlin
<[hidden email]> wrote:
> I have completed a first pass over the draft Etoys Reference Manual,
> adding as much information as I could easily find about Object types,
> program tiles, tools, menus, and so on, and adding outlines for a
> chapter on Etoys programming and a Glossary. More information is
> needed.
>
> I am in a strange position, learning Etoys by writing substantial
> portions of its Reference Manual, something that I do not think would
> be possible for any other programming system. I found the early
> tutorials a delight, up to the point where everything else was
> completely opaque to me. After learning a bit of Squeak, and getting
> just a few more hints, I found Etoys starting to make real sense, and
> now I can use a substantial subset of it. When I get through the parts
> of this manual that I can do, I will turn to creating Etoys projects
> to illustrate the issues I found missing, and to take up various
> education topics. Some will be in the manner of my Turtle Art
> tutorials and Tony Forster's, but of course Etoys supports doing far
> more than that.
>
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt/Tutorials
>
> Can anybody help with these Etoys objects that either need explanation
> or are simply not present in the versions I have access to? In
> particular, communication between Etoys sessions and users remains
> entirely opaque to me.
>
> Communications
>
> Attachment Adjuster

For connectors.

> Badge
> Fridge
> NebraskaServer
These are all of a etoys networking experiment.
I do not think they are of much use to students unless they are
enhanced quite a bit

>
>
> Objects not found in Object Catalog--Can we remove these?
>
> Calendar

This is a basic calendar.
It has a few tiles associated with it

> Dr. Geo http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=676.0

Dr Geo is a whole book of features. http://www.drgeo.eu/

> Flap

Flaps are a very useful widget that you can use to hold and hide
objects of all sorts. You can have local flaps that hold objects in
just the current project ( viewers are local flaps). You can have
global flaps that you can access in all projects (the help flap and
the 'gold box ' are global flaps). Flaps are basically a PasteUpMorph
that can slide in and out from the edge of another PasteUpMorph. You
can use the same settings for flap panes as for PasteUpMorphs.
Flap tabs can be edited for name and color, edge bevel etc.

To have a "global flap" from the flap menu check "shared by all projects" this can be used to "copy" objects between projects. You need to be careful that whatever objects you copy between projects are "self contained" (ie: do not refer to any other objects, that you do not copy, in any scripts).

> Graph
> Graphing
> H Number Linecan

Number lines allow you to have an alternate scale for the playfield they are in. For example drag a rectangle into playfield (the world, page in a book, holder or a playfield object) then open its viewer and look at the basic and graphing categories. You will see that "x" and "x on graph" are the same. Next drag in a "Horizontal Number line" (or Verical) and you will see the values for "x on graph change. You can change the "number line" using the number line category in its viewer.

The "X-Y plane" in the Graphing category of the Object Catolog provides a pre-gridded playfield (ctually Graph Paper) with X-Y axis. Get the "X-Y plane"s Halo and click on the Eye dropper to adjust the grid sizes. There are some issues when you adjust the grid sizes and move the Number Lines which I wish were "better integrated" and also the playfield's gridding (from the menu ==> playfield options) is not the same as the gridding used for the "graph paper" lines.

> Key press

Key press is used to deal with the problem of handling multiple key presses at the same time. This pops up for kids when they are trying to create multi-player games. Try using "last keystroke" from the input category for two or more keys then press both keys at the same time. Only the last one pressed wins. With Key Press you can detect multiple KeyPresses at the same time (limited I believe by the hardware). To change the key simply click in the white area and then "Press new key". Then to use in a script (with a Test block) go the the "Key Press" objects viewer ==> input category and use [key is pressed] tile. You can also detect how long a key is pressed as well (and reset that value to fire a message every n milli-seconds).

> Speech Bubbles

I do not know much about these objects.

Way cool, you should check Ricardo's demo projects. These are similar to Scratch "Say/Think" tiles with the added benefit that they you can embed objects in them (which can also be scripted and thus have animated Speech and Though bubbles.

>
> Other
>
> Arrow Editor

This is part of connectors. Could probably be hidden. Quite buggy.

> Image How to substitute another image?
>
> Particles What is Kedama? http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1092381
>
> Kedama: A GUI-Based Interactive Massively Parallel Particle Programming System
> http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/VLHCC.2005.49
> Purchase article: $19
>
> http://community.ofset.org/index.php/Etoys_and_Kedama
>
> I plan to combine redundant accounts of particular features, move a
> few topics to what seems to me a more logical order, and add some more
> topics. I especially plan to explain how Etoys development tools work,
> and how one accesses Squeak development tools from Etoys. A tutorial
> on either Etoys or Squeak development is, of course, inappropriate for
> this manual, but I do want to demonstrate how one can look inside
> Etoys object definitions using Squeak. This question is somewhat
> confusing, because things may have different names and different
> structures in their Etoys and Squeak manifestations. Has anybody ever
> made a tool for exposing the structure of the Squeak definitions of
> Etoys objects?

Some experiment have been done. Nothing I know of that is 'student ready'.

>
> Lots more questions to come

Sounds great

+1 Thanks for all your efforts. Keep up the good work!!!

Karl

.
>
> --
> Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin
> Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
> The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks
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