Welcome to Our Squeak Project Report! By: Daisy Diaz and Noe Loarca
For our final project in Computer Science class, we decided that we would learn how to use Squeak and then teach some children at Buckingham Community Center in Arlington by using tutorials, some we made, and some we didn't.
To be specific this is their information:
Buckingham Community Outreach Center 4116 North 3rd Road Arlington, VA 22203 (703)-351-0019
If you go to http://squeak.org it will tell you that Squeak,"is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks."
Translated into english, Squeak is a program that helps teach kids how to make their own mini programs using simple scripts. It is really easy and fun. Squeak is setup to be appealing to little children. They learn lots of ideas while having fun. Finding out what squeak was, and how it worked made us want to try it out.
For tutorials, and ideas of what we could create, we went to http://squeakland.org . The first tutorial we used was from Squeakland and we personally tried it out. http://squeakland.org/school/drive_a_car/html/Drivecar12.html . That tutorial teaches you the basics for making a very simple script to make a car and drive it. The first time we went was on May 25th, 2005. We decided to go to the community center on wednesdays, because those are the days that the kids go there. When we got there, We immediately convinced the kids they would want to use the program. The kids were excited because we told them they would create their own games. At the center the children were all eight to twelve years old. All of them love playing games online and decided that making their own game would be just as fun as any other online game.
The second time we went was on June 1st, 2005. We used a combination of the first tutorial and one we wrote ourselves. We realized that the kids got confused the first week a little, because they didn't know the Squeak basics, this is just an excerpt of the tutorial we wrote about basic painting, "it's time to Learn Squeak. The First thing we'll need to work on is painting. In order to paint you have to go to widgets the small blue tab on the bottom right. Click on that to get some of the programming tools you will need. You will find a small pallet with the words Paint underneath. Click on it and drag it into the desktop (The desktop is the blank background). A small part of the desktop will be shaded. That is where you draw. Draw your car with the paintbrush or whatever item you like. The car can look how ever you want it to look.
When you are done, press keep. All the drawings you have done on the shaded part will now be a part of the desktop . Now you want a script. The script will change what it does. Right click directly on the car and alot of little circles with different pictures will show up. Click on the blue eye on the left. You will get what we call a script." We tried wording it so that it would be easy to read by the kids of that age group.
The third time we went was on June 8th, 2005. That week we focused on the first part of the Fishbowl tutorial which worked with Alice Squeak. This is a link to it: http://www.consultar.com/Squeak/tutorial/fishbowl.html . We worked on actually getting the kids to be able to open up a new wonderland by themselves, and the basics of Alice Squeak. We ran into a few difficulties, first of all when you make a 3-D Object it's supposed to look like your painting in red, and sometimes the red line wouldn't show up. We figured out that it would work though if you completely exited Squeak and opened it again. Another thing we found that didn't work was that when the kids went to go and paint their 3-D object the only color they could paint it was blue, supposedly a paint palette was supposed to show up but it never would. That frustrated the kids a bit, because everyone had the same color blue blobs. By the end of that day we got all of the kids to open up their wonderland, create an object, and move it.