Waveplace Blog : October 2007

Yesterday I set up a weblog on the Waveplace site, so I can write little dispatches about the research we've done over the summer. http://waveplace.com/ (click "Blog") I'll try to write a little bit every weekday, so check back frequently if you're interested. For those that know what RSS is, you can also subscribe to the feed: http://bigfractaltangle.com/waveplace.rdf As you can see, these posts are from my primary blog, "Big Fractal Tangle". They're the ones tagged "waveplace". http://bigfractaltangle.com Anyway, I won't bother the mailing list with these daily dispatches ... tune in yourself if you're interested. I'll be talking about...

So here I am, with three months of research, and nowhere to use it. Over the summer, I immersed myself in the writings of Seymour Papert and the works of Alan Kay and Mitch Resnick, both of whom drew inspiration from Papert. I've been walking around with a running dialogue in my head, inspired by the same ideas that launched OLPC and countless other efforts. So what's Papert's point? What's the common gist of the half-dozen books he's written, starting with "Mindstorms" in 1980? Okay, I'll give it a shot. Seymour Papert thinks that we're programming our kids in school...

Yesterday we received our very own XO laptop from OLPC to play with. We'd seen one up close at Squeakfest last August, but now we've got time to get to know it and show it off to others. Here Paula's trying Squeak Etoys on it: As you can see next to her 15" MacBook, the XO is made for little hands. I was very pleased with its performance. Fedora & Sugar booted in a minute and Etoys loaded in about ten seconds which is plenty fast enough. Also very impressive was the reflective display. You really can read things in...

In the last two days, I've been teaching twenty-year-old Nicole to use Squeak Etoys. She's never done any programming before, nor does she really know why she'd want to be a programmer, which puts her in the majority. I'm teaching her as warm-up for some video tutorials I'm making for the general public, the first of which is rendering right now. Teaching a novice to program is a humbling task, particularly for an expert. I'm mindful of the pacing of my presentation. Too much and eyes glaze over, too little and boredom sets in. Constructionism is a great fit to...

I've just posted the first two screencast tutorials on Squeak Etoys. Originally, the plan was for us to be in St John right now, prepping for our three-day Etoys workshop at Caneel Bay. Since the funding didn't materialize, I'm making these short movies instead, hoping they're enough for Bill & Mary to struggle through on their own. The first movie discusses how to install Squeak Etoys and the latest OLPC Etoys image on your computer (particularly if you own a Mac). The next shows Etoys in action for about fifteen minutes. My next screencast will be on Tuesday. Let me...

Over the long weekend, I got some very positive feedback regarding my Squeaky Tales series. People seemed to like my movies, though my first attempts had some video compression snags which forced me to temporarily abandon Flash video in favor of Quicktime. The downside was that the movies took a long time to start, since they were essentially fully downloading before beginning. Today I worked out the kinks and encoded them back as Flash FLV movies. They should start up more quickly and should also be more compatible with different systems. FLV is the video format used on YouTube. I...

I've just posted the first two screencast tutorials on Squeak Etoys. The first movie discusses how to install Squeak Etoys and the latest OLPC Etoys image on your computer (particularly if you own a Mac). The next shows Etoys in action for about fifteen minutes....

Towards the end of yesterday's Squeaky Tale, I tried changing the color of something and found (while recording) that I didn't know what I was doing. My first reaction was "Oh geez, I should reshoot that" lest I lose face to the viewing public. Instead, I left my mistake in the video, since it helps demonstrate an important point. Programming is about making mistakes. You try something, see how it goes, try something else, and grin at your flaws. A programmer that thinks he knows everything in advance is a bad programmer. Such an approach might seem alien, since our...

Just had the Shift Happens video link sent to me. Quite an eye opener, as is the terrific Pay Attention video, which focuses more on teaching. Put simply: within our lifetime, the "rote jobs" will ship overseas. It's clear from the numbers. What's left are "spark jobs" ... high creativity jobs. Our schools aren't teaching spark. They're teaching rote....

I've just posted my eighth 15-minute Squeaky Tales tutorial, bringing the collective time to two hours of Etoys fun. My plan is to create four 15-minute movies each week for the next eight weeks for a total of ten hours of video tutorial. What topics will I cover? Well, I'm trying to make the Squeaky Tales series as subject-neutral as possible. My hope is that this approach will allow mentors to adapt the concepts to different ages and subjects more easily. By necessity, there will be rudimentary math concepts like addition and multiplication, but these will be presented as a...

In the year 2000, world leaders made eight pretty incredible promises, which are known as the Millennium Development Goals. The first of these goals is to reduce by half the number of people living in extreme poverty by the year 2015. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than $1 USD per day. More than 1.5 billion people qualify, which is roughly 1 out of every 4 people alive. Two-thirds of these people don't have access to clean water, and malnutrition is so bad that six million children die EVERY YEAR before their fifth birthday. That's a holocaust-sized catastrophe...