[Etoys] Attempt to interactive geometry in SqueakLand-OLPC

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Hilaire,

  Sorry for a bit late.

> >   This is a serious and impressive work.  However, for OLPC, I feel
> 
> Please tell me if the OLPC is responsive enough with a complex 
> interactive drawing. I am curious.

  It is quite ok.  I have bunch of stuff in DrGeo window, and create a
script for a point and change its coordianate repeatedly by ticking
the script.  I get 15-19 fps, for example.

> > that many Pythonists are contemplating similar systems.  (We have yet
> 
> contemplating = admiring?

  "thinking silently", but I figured that my usage was not correct.

  I meant that Pythonists are thinking without making a lot of
discussions except a little bit on the python edu-sig mainling list,
which is... quite uninformative^^;)

> Once upon a time I use Python and I also wrote articles about Python 
> programming in LinuxFocus online magazine[1] and I can quite objectively 
> write that  Squeak and Python are not playing in the same conceptual 
> plane when it is about education oriented application development.

  One long term "hope", "goal", or whatever that some of the members
at OLPC have is to make the laptop a "python" machine.  Like Lisp
machines or Smalltalk machines in the past but done "for" and "in"
Python.  In that setting, pushing a different language has always some
implications.  Kind of the same discussion again, but it is not about
which is good/not good at what.

> As in Sciences, the things are not compartmented. There are conceptual 
> bridges between mathematics and physics, geometry and optics, geometry 
> and physics, etc. Everything is conceptually connected.
> Concerning education and computer use, and in particularly microworld 
> system, it is very important to have such system interconnected. It 
> helps to make kids to think in system where things are connected like 
> objects in the real world. And moreover it gives to teachers and kids 
> the opportunity to build easily interconnected simulation systems.
> In education we suffer to much about compartmented teaching, probably 
> because teachers do not communicate enough among them.

  Yes.

> Such microworld system could be about many of the sciences fields: 
> optics, physics, mechanic, electricity, chemistry, geometry (DrGeoII is 
> such a system). EToys itself is a general microworld system.
> In this vision the glue/link component between these microworld is the 
> EToys scripting system itself.

  And, yes.

-- Yoshiki