Hi Ray and all, <br><br>Here are some things that I found on Squeakland regarding Scratch and Etoys comparison. There are pros and cons to both:<br><br><p>What is special about Etoys? Put your ideas here or send an email to <a href="mailto:squeakland@squeakland.org">squeakland@squeakland.org</a>.</p>
<ul class="alternate" type="square"><li>The integration of "etoyish apps"
<ul class="alternate" type="square"><li>Graphs: With Ned Konz' "NetMorphs" you could produce things like <span class="nobr"><a href="http://scg.unibe.ch/download/petitpetri/" title="Visit page outside Confluence" rel="nofollow">petrinets<sup><img class="rendericon" src="http://wiki.squeakland.org/images/icons/linkext7.gif" alt="" align="absmiddle" border="0" height="7" width="7"></sup></a></span></li>
<li>Kedama</li><li>Dr. Geo (to be coming)</li></ul>
</li><li>Real subroutines (as opposed to Scratch)</li><li>Unframed
interactive environment for wider and deeper experience. Well, one may
say it is a disadvantage because of the white page syndrome it
induces...</li></ul>
<ul class="alternate" type="square"><li>Clean open source license now (opposed to the source restrictions in scratch)</li></ul>
<p>from Bert Fruedenberg's mail (answer to Bill Kerr)</p>
<p>The power of Scratch lies in its limited scope - several years of
development and refinement went into it to find the smallest set of
features that make it easily teachable while still broadly applicable.</p>
<p>There are others who could describe the Squeak/Etoys philosophy better than me, but one of its core ideas is "no limits".</p>
<p>Where Scratch is a closed environment, Etoys provides just a thin
layer of visual scripting on top of a much larger system. There are
literally hundreds of objects that can be used as building blocks, from
basic ones like rectangles, ellipses, polygons, or text, to complex
ones like a book or a MIDI sequencer or video player or a working chess
game (in Scratch there are only bitmap-sprites). In Etoys you can
change coordinate systems, or embed objects into each other creating
hierarchical animations, or connect objects with arrows to create
diagrams that are fully scriptable, etc. In Scratch, every Sprite is
separate, and they can communicate with others only by broadcasting -
this is more limited but much easier to learn, and less prone to errors.</p>
<p>And if all that is not enough (there are always things the designers
can't anticipate) Etoys lets you escape to the full Squeak environment.
While Scratch is implemented in Squeak too, you cannot access it. Again
that limitation was a conscious trade-off (for example it enables
"players" for Scratch projects to be implemented in other languages).</p>
<p>Here are a few examples of my own projects in the Squeak showcase that I think would be hard to recreate in Scratch.</p>
<p>Collision Physics<br>
<span class="nobr"><a href="http://squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7052" title="Visit page outside Confluence" rel="nofollow">http://squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7052<sup><img class="rendericon" src="http://wiki.squeakland.org/images/icons/linkext7.gif" alt="" align="absmiddle" border="0" height="7" width="7"></sup></a></span><br>
(objects with collision sensors adding their forces to influence motion, this one is pure Etoys)</p>
<p>OLPC-XO-Display<br>
<span class="nobr"><a href="http://squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7050" title="Visit page outside Confluence" rel="nofollow">http://squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7050<sup><img class="rendericon" src="http://wiki.squeakland.org/images/icons/linkext7.gif" alt="" align="absmiddle" border="0" height="7" width="7"></sup></a></span><br>
(adds a new Squeak class to simulate the pixel pattern of the XO's display)</p>
<p>Euros<br>
<span class="nobr"><a href="http://squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7055" title="Visit page outside Confluence" rel="nofollow">http://squeakland.org/showcase/project.jsp?id=7055<sup><img class="rendericon" src="http://wiki.squeakland.org/images/icons/linkext7.gif" alt="" align="absmiddle" border="0" height="7" width="7"></sup></a></span><br>
(connects to a web service to get currency conversion rate using a few lines of Squeak scripting)</p>
<p>One of the fundamental Etoys ideas is that "authoring is always on",
hence there are no designated screen areas reserved for authoring
tools. In fact, the tools cannot be used just on the user-created
content, but on the tools themselves. This is a powerful idea in our
opinion, it helps in demystifying the tools.</p>
<p>You can have both tile scripts and textual scripts in Etoys, too.
The difference is that there is no real need to use the textual
scripting for the same stuff you can do with tiles. It's to access the
advanced features, but you will have to know Squeak first to even know
what to look for.</p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p>
<p>Cheers,</p><p>Cherry<br></p><p><br></p><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 10:59 PM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rayb@apc.edu.ph">rayb@apc.edu.ph</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi, all,<br>
<br>
The cover story of the November issue of Communications of the ACM is about the Scratch visual programming environment: <a href="http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/11/48421-scratch-programming-for-all/fulltext" target="_blank">http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/11/48421-scratch-programming-for-all/fulltext</a><br>
<br>
Scratch is one of the activities installed on the XO. A related package is Etoys --mentioned in the article but not discussed further. About all I know of these packages is that both are implemented in Squeak Smalltalk and both enable multimedia authoring. So I ask those in the know: which would be better for introducing programming to middle school or high school kids?<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
<br>
Ray<br>
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