education team meeting notes October 23

Hi all,

here are the notes from our meeting last week:

http://wiki.squeakland.org/display/sq/2009/10/23

Greetings,
Rita

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Randy, Avigail, Cathie, Cherry, Christine, Hilaire, Rita

We started discussing two questions Avigail raised in an email, which
are now related to tracker issues.
*1.* How to edit/change a project that is already in the showcase? Find
more details and comments in the tracker here:

http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ-534^
*2.* How to choose appropriate age recommendation for projects? As it
turns out, the current items to choose from (up to 8 years, 9-11, 12-14,
15 and older) are very hard to use. Especially the upper limit can
descourage older kids to even try the project. And when choosing the
target age for projects, it is ok to choose the minimal age, but often
the upper limit is not appropriate. Since we want to have target age for
the projects in featured showcase, the options should be changed. The
result of our discussion is this:

   * ages 8 - older

   * ages 12 - older

   * ages 15 - older

   * 18+

Here is the related tracker issue:

http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ-533^

Related to that we think that every project in featured showcase
*should* have target age. We have to find out if it is possible somehow
to add categorization to projects which are already uploaded. If this is
impossible, we will at least add the relevant information using comments.
Featured projects should cover all age groups from elementary school to
college level.
Since it seems to be hard to add target age later, we talked about how
to encourage people, and especially kids, to choose a target age for
their projects (withour pressing them to do so). Cathie came up with a
nice text:

/If you would like to share your project with the most people possible,
please indicate what age person might be most interested in looking at
or using your project./
*3.* We discussed which projects should be featured for the new release.
Currently on our list are:

   * all projects from the gallery, which are not in the tutorials
     section on the website:
     salmon sniff
     fish and plankton
     simple springs
     lunar lander game
     ball drop analysis
     bouncing ball animation
     make a movie
     speed acceleration
     random racing
     computer logic game
     turtle geometry

   * other projects to feature:
     rabbits and grass
     butterfly queen
     seymour quest
     sun earth moon
     add relative integer
     Pling
     Ant Colony
     Morphing
     Spirograph
     nBody

Every project should have a description what it is about, especially
projects like butterfly queen (story telling), which is the winenr of
the waveplace awards. We also discussed if we should add more
information about the developer of the project, like age and gender, to
encourage and motivate other kids, but we should probably not publish
such information about younger children, so we will not do this.

*4.* During our discussion about target age we again hit the point of
having two different kind of projects: projects which are "just for fun"
and projects with a sopecial purpose and how to distinguish between these.

*5.* Courseware
We are working on short descriptions for the courseware units.
We discussed examples of how the startpage for the courseware could look
like. The design of the page is important also from an educational point
of view. Avigail suggested to look up other education websites. Randy
suggested to use a circle and put the categories around it, with arrows
showing the relations between the topics. In the middle we can write up
the main ideas of Etoys.
We looked up some examplary websites:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5sNE5ktPHQ4/Rrz-RLNHnFI/AAAAAAAAACc/WOHdV-NoUXU/s320/matrix.jpg^

http://studentaffairs.uoregon.edu/planning/images/curriculum1.png^
http://www.cast.uark.edu/assets/images/Research/Geomatics/geomatics.jpg^
http://ceep.crc.uiuc.edu/pubs/katzsym/dodge2.gif^

The second link was best appreciated. Cherry will make a first draft
based on the example, using our list of units.
*6.* Cherry told us that John Stout is asking for help using the mesh
network with Etoys. Rita advised that he should ask his questions on the
squeakland mailing list.

--
Rita Freudenberg
Squeakland Foundation
http://www.squeakland.org

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