[Etoys] Demon Castle Tutorials for eToys

[Alan Kay]

Hi Andreas --

There is actually a plan for what to do when one gets stuck. There 
will be a "hints" button on every page, and when you touch it (if 
you've tried already), the system will show you (via event recorder 
and a scripting area) how to do it. All of these are revertable 
(thanks to Ted and Scott).

This double tactic (of doing the game first and then using a hint 
demo if stuck) seems like it will be good for the kids and is likely 
to work fairly well.

Cheers,

Alan

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

At 08:58 PM 10/19/2006, Andreas Raab wrote:
>Hi Takashi -
>
>Some comments on the tutorials (which you can completely ignore if you
>don't like 'em ;-) All in all, this is very, very cool. Going through
>the exercise it struck me that it would be wonderful if for each of the
>challenges there would be some "help me" or "show me" button that a user
>could use if they are stuck. Something to think about, perhaps for the
>next version. Here are some issues that I encountered with the tutorials:
>
> > http://tinlizzie.org/olpc/tutorial/DemonCastle1.004.pr (handles)
>
>* On the first page where it says "Click THIS arrow" I'd move the text
>closer to the arrow. I was kinda looking for "another" arrow because the
>one you mean is quite far away from the text.
>
>* On the third page (with the first key) I would change the text from
>"Go ahead you can move the key" to something like "Go ahead, drag the
>key on the keyhole" (to emphasize that you mean click and drag)
>
>* On the "resize handle" page it was very hard to find quite the right
>size for the key. It seems as if there is only a small range in which it
>will fit and it was quite tricky to get that "just right". I wonder if
>there is an easy way to increase that range?
>
> > http://tinlizzie.org/olpc/tutorial/DemonCastle2.004.pr (painter)
>
>* The event recorder didn't work at all for me. For one thing the
>painting palette popped up in a flap (and from the recorded strokes it
>looks like you were making this with the palette embedded in the
>playfield). Some wrong preference? Second, I had moved the book slightly
>because it didn't fit my screen so the event recorder was off. We should
>lock the book so that one cannot move it to avoid this problem.
>
>* I notice that the brush sizes are smaller than we chose back in
>Boston. Is this intentional or am I missing some update?
>
> > http://tinlizzie.org/olpc/tutorial/DemonCastle3.004.pr (scriptor)
>
>* On the second page the down-arrow points to the close button of the
>scriptor instead of the fire button. This is confusing since it's not
>clear if you've drawn the right button and point to the wrong button or
>vice versa.
>
>* On the page with the three test tiles in a single script, wouldn't it
>be easier to make three scripts instead? Or is there a point to this I'm
>missing?
>
>Other than that these are *great* tutorials.
>
>Cheers,
>   - Andreas
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