Re: [IAEP] Why is Scratch more popular than Etoys?

I looked at this TED presentation today:
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world.html

He say there are a trillion hours of participatory value up for grabs.

We could do with some more people working on Etoys :-)

I also looked at these two web forum pages discussing programming for
kids pages today but not much love for Etoys:

http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/169225.html
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/kgbzq/why_we_should_teach_our_kids_to_code/

There seems to be a mismatch from we perceive as values and strong
features of Etoys and what other people see.  Why do we not get the
ideas out? What makes is so hard ? Do people test Etoys and drop it ?




Karl



On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 10:44 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr.
<jecel-/J8iz1DznIp8UrSeD/[email protected]> wrote:
> Alan Kay wrote:
>> [...]
>> Then we handed Etoys over to the Squeak Foundation, and the version
>> they put out online retains the classroom UI with flaps.
>
> Actually, that would be the Squeakland Foundation. But in the Squeak
> Board at least Bert and I try to represent the interests of the Etoys
> (and Scratch) users.
>
> One reason for Scratch's popularity is the restrictions they have made
> which upset some people in the OLPC community. Etoys, on the other hand,
> suffered from some of the problems that open source projects have -
> students and teacher become very upset when some project they have
> created won't load into a newer version of the system. Note that I am
> fully on the side of Etoys here, but we have to be aware of the costs.
>
> It is interesting to me that Scratch's explict loops (compared to Etoys'
> clock driven scripts) don't seem to cause any difficulties for beginners
> nor for young children. That shows how important it is to test stuff
> rather than follow our intuitions.
>
> What I would really like (in the sense that I am trying to get funding
> to pay a group of people to build) would be a system within
> Croquet/Cobalt that would start out like Scratch, then become more and
> more like Etoys as the programmer's skills improved with a smooth path
> all the way to the Smalltalk level.
>
> Jens Mönig, the guy who did BYOB (Build Your Own Block extension of
> Scratch), also created Elements, which is a Scratch syntax for
> Smalltalk-80:
>
> http://www.chirp.scratchr.org/blog/?p=24
>
> So it is easy enough to see how far this approach can scale.
>
> -- Jecel
>
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