Waveplace Blog : Etoys

(written with Susan Jordan, from newsletter) The purpose of education is to teach kids how to become critical and creative thinkers. It's about the process, not the end product. When children are learning, you can get inside their mind and break apart what they are doing to find out what they know and where they need to grow. The brain thinks visually. Squeak Etoys takes full advantage of this by being a cognitive bridge that takes traditional concepts and connects them to 21st century thinking skills and computer programming content. Etoys appeals to students emotionally as something fun and exciting....

(by Dr. Alan Kay of Viewpoints Research Institute, from newsletter) Children are set up by nature to learn the world around them by watching adult activity and playing imitation games. Dewey pointed out that this is difficult in today's developed cultures because many important adult activities are opaque or not found in every home. Montessori thought that children's urge to learn the world by immersion and play could be powerfully used for twentieth-century learning if the children were placed into twentieth-century environments and given toys that embodied twentieth-century ideas. One of her special insights was that a main task of...

(from newsletter) Very likely if you're reading this, you love shiny new toys. Especially intriguing are the clever ones: the iPhone's, Wii's, and XO laptops. Handling a new inspired design is a little slice of Christmas morning, a reminder of a time when gadget play was all that mattered. The XO is quite an eye-catcher. One look and you know it's something to pick up and explore. Like so many toys that make our daily grind a bit better ... Bluetooth headsets, touchscreen remotes, talking GPS nav ... the XO excites our imagination with its swivel screen, mesh networking, and...

Been a pretty cool week so far. On Monday, Viewpoints Research contracted Immuexa to redesign their Squeakland website. Given that Etoys is the crown jewel in the OLPC lineup, we're pretty excited. We're hoping to launch this winter. On Tuesday, OLPC started mass production of the XO laptops. I've been a fly on the wall listening to their team talk for months. Having been entrenched in development mayhem much of my life, let me simply say it's a big accomplishment. Congrats to all. On Wednesday, we launched the beta of Blazemark 2.0, which is being shown at a fire-fighting convention...

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...