Squeak History

Hi All,

The PR Team is putting together a press release about the Squeak booth at
Smalltalk Solutions. (We're also working on one about the Squeak gold/silver
badge campaign starting at the end of this month.) We need to know something
from the collective memory of Squeakers: is a booth for Squeak at a trade
show/convention unprecedented?

Chris Cunnington
PR Team leader

On 27-Mar-07, at 11:03 AM, Chris Cunnington wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> The PR Team is putting together a press release about the Squeak  
> booth at
> Smalltalk Solutions. (We're also working on one about the Squeak  
> gold/silver
> badge campaign starting at the end of this month.)
The badges are here and we need to sort out the webpage for donating  
etc. Soon....
Do you want some sent to you for the show?

> We need to know something
> from the collective memory of Squeakers: is a booth for Squeak at a  
> trade
> show/convention unprecedented?
To the best of my knowledge, yes it is. Good luck with it!


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Fractured Idiom:- IDIOS AMIGOS - We're wild and crazy guys!

On Mar 27, 2007, at 20:03 , Chris Cunnington wrote:

There has been a Squeak booth at LinuxTag in Germany at least as far  
back as 2002:

        http://www.pro-linux.de/berichte/lt2002/linuxtag2002.html

- Bert -

Bert,

I did a Squeak booth for the 2nd year running at the SoCal Linux Expo 2007
in Feb in L.A. This year we generated a lot more interest as we were
promoting the Squeak robotics program that my organization, the Hawthorne
Center for Innovation, is going to be launching soon -- and I can attest
that many geeks will come over and see what's what and give you their
contact info if robotics is involved. We also did a Birds of a Feather
session that was well attended entitled: "A New Kind of Robotics with
Squeak"

BTW, I plugged LASTUG (Los Angeles Smalltalk User Group) - www.lastug.org
and a few people are starting to trickle in to the monthly meetings who
heard about it at the Hawthorne Center booth at the Expo.

I run the Hawthorne Center for Innovation -  www.hawcenter.org (bare with
me, the site is being reworked). We are out in the Riverside / San
Beranrdino area of Southern Californa. The Hawthorne Center is in a room
behind my house. I have 10 computers set up and have been working with about
20 kids (ages 10 - on up) for the last year who are being introduced to
Squeak 3.8.

I and Ben Cooper - the Center is acting as a tech incubator for projects Ben
is developing - found out about Squeak in Sept 2005. I bumped into "Squeak:
Learn Programming with Robots" (thank you, Stephane!!) on the internet. I
immediately ordered the book. I was very excited because, even though I
couldn't understand a word of what Stephane was writing about, it looked
like it would now be possible to get open source software (that kids could
easily learn to program in - at least that is what I kept reading) and
robotics together. Ben taught himself Squeak (from all the books we could
round up) and started teaching it in April 2006. Since there is precious
little documentation for how to start from absolute zero he had to create a
lecture series from scratch - and ask questions at LASTUG.

The class started out as an introduction to programming with Squeak so that
the kids could write code for robots but has morphed into a group that is
helping Ben to build a universal interface for all future robotics.  Soon,
the kids are going to start learning screencasting so that we can make video
tutorials about how to code in Squeak for all the other abolute beginner
kids and (moms) out there who want to get involved with our up-coming
robotics program. We will be posting them to Hawthorne Center website as
they get made.

Donna


----- Original Message -----
From: "Bert Freudenberg" <[hidden email]>
To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list"
<[hidden email]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 11:59 AM
Subject: Re: Squeak History