evaluation

As a final task for this course I asked the students to evaluate the different programs and activities that we did. Here are some of the results:

Class votes of what students thought about what we did, out of 5 :
Scratch 4.3
Physics 4.1
Guest speakers 3.9
SVG icon / hacking sugar / command line 3.5
Turtle Art 3.5
Other activities 3.5
EToys 2.9

BEST THING
Physics (5)
Turtle Art (3)
new sugar activities (2)
SVG icon / hacking sugar / command line (2)
Sugar UI

WORST THING
Etoys (5)
Turtle Art (2)
blogging (2)
SVG icon / hacking sugar / command line
guest speakers
Scratch

MOST INTERESTING
Scratch (2)
Food force (2)
SVG icon / hacking sugar / command line (2)
Turtle Art (2)

guest speakers (2)
new sugar activities
etoys
Physics

MOST DIFFICULT
Etoys (9)
SVG icon / hacking sugar / command line (3)
Scratch
Turtle Art

Thanks again to the guest speakers: Rosemary about Timor Leste and Joel about the xo development

The SVG icon activity meant developing your own icon using raw XML and then hacking through the linux command line to replace the existing xo icon

Air Sok's final blog provides a positive account of what some students got out of this course

Thanks to the students for being a great class

scratchy etoys challenge: some results

I asked students to complete some challenges in both Scratch and Etoys and then provide screenshots and compare the programs. Nearly all students reported that they found Scratch easier to work with than Etoys. No big surprise in that. As Bert Freudenberg has pointed out:

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
(follow the link for Bert's fuller comparison between the two programs)

Here are the challenges again (initially designed for Scratch) with a few brief comments and links to the students blogs for their screenshots and thoughts.

Challenge 1) Use the Letter shapes to write your first name on the page. Then introduce some special effects such as making the letters wobble and change their appearance.

One student did this in etoys as an extension. Since it was an extension he did not have to blog about it. He did a great job it etoys, with the letters of his name chasing themselves across the screen, but it lacked the whirl and fisheye effects that are easy to do in Scratch and are ideal for this challenge.

Challenge 2) Point, click and move
Make an object both point and glide towards the mouse position when you click on the stage
Hint: Motion > point towards
Hint: Sensing > mouse down?

I couldn't fully figure this out myself in etoys and so asked for help on the Squeakland list. I received a lot of help there and so was able to show the students how to do it in etoys. Their writeup is here

Challenge 3) Make Dan or Anjuli or Cassy or ballerina dance to a beat, using all of their dance shapes

Two groups did this. One of them made a series of drawings for the dancer. The other group just dragged the prebuilt images from Scratch into Etoys (both programs running in Windows) and that worked fine. I hadn't realised it was that easy to import images into etoys. The student work is here and here

Challenge 4a) Make two animals have a forwards and backwards conversation
Hint: Use broadcast
4b) Make it an interesting conversation with each animal speaking at least 3 times and making gestures too

I figured out how to do this in etoys but it wasn't very elegant. So, once again I asked on the list and received help from Yoshiki Ohshima who showed me a more elegant method using the Holder.

The student analysis of this task is here

Challenge 5) Make 2 different balls move around on the stage
a) the first ball moves in straight lines but bounces randomly whenever it hits the edge
b) the second moves randomly, changing direction all the time

Because this involved a random bounce off the walls of the Playfield in etoys I thought it was fairly easy. For a true bounce it would have been more difficult in etoys since it lacks a true bounce tile (which Scratch has) and so the students would have had to work out the formula.

oops - Bert Freudenberg has pointed out that the etoys true bounce tile is there and similar to the Scratch tile. I just found it in the motion pane. Thanks Bert. (update 29th November)

Student work is here

Challenge 6a) One sprite chases another sprite around the stage. The first sprite moves in straight line but bounces off the edge randomly. The chasing sprite chases the first sprite but is moving slower.
b) Extension – if the chasing sprite catches the other sprite then it says something sensible and makes a suitable sound

The students completed a comprehensive write up of this challenge here

Challenge 7a) Play all the different drum sounds automatically
Hint: create a variable for the drum number
b) Extension – keep recycling through all the drum sounds automatically

Etoys sounds not working so we didn't attempt this. I'm not sure why the sounds were not working for SoaS, I didn't get around to trouble shooting that.

Challenge 8) Make a sprite gradually grow in size and then shrink
Hint: make a size variable

My hint is not necessary here because it can be done without a variable in both programs. Eventually I figured that out and advised the students which simplified the task somewhat. Initially they did it in etoys using diffent sized pictures in a Holder but I told them I wanted a more flexible answer. Their work is here.

Challenge 9a) Count down on a timer. A rocket takes off when you reach zero
Hint: Use the number icons in the letters folder
9b) Your rocket has pulsating exhaust and disappears at the top of the screen

Not attempted partly because it is already an existing Project in the etoys gallery

Challenge 10) Add, multiply or subtract two variable numbers
Hint: Just to do addition only you will need 4 variables: firstNum, secondNum, answer (computer calculated) and myAnswer (human calculated)

This is written up in here (Scratch solution) and here (Etoys solution)

Challenge 11) Variable coloured squares
a) Write a script that can draw a square of any size
Hint: Make a variable for the side length
b) Use the variable square script to draw a series of square with variable sides, with a single click
c) Now add variable pen colour and pen shade to the variable square script and use it to draw a variety of different coloured squares, with a single click

NOT YET WRITTEN UP

One thing I noticed about part (c) is that it is difficult to programmatically increment colours in Etoys because they are not represented by single numbers

Footnote: I'll update the links to student work as it is completed in the next few days.

scratchy etoys challenge

I have asked my students to complete a challenge in Scratch, then build a similar challenge in etoys and then compare and analyse the work involved. For this task they are allowed to work in groups of two.

The challenges were initially developed for Scratch and so the hints below are applicable for Scratch. For day one of this task each group had to pick a different challenge. So far these challenges are being attempted (1-5, 6 and 8). This kept me busy today because there were a lot of questions about how to do different things in etoys. Most of them I could answer but I'm still trying to work out how to detect a mouse click for challenge 2 (we did work out how to point towards and follow the mouse though)

(correction: I have worked out how to point towards another object which is being moved by the mouse but can't see how to follow the mouse itself since the bearing tile does not accept world's mouse x and y as input)

1) Use the Letter shapes to write your first name on the page. Then introduce some special effects such as making the letters wobble and change their appearance.

2) Point, click and move
Make an object both point and glide towards the mouse position when you click on the stage
Hint: Motion > point towards
Hint: Sensing > mouse down?

3) Make Dan or Anjuli or Cassy or ballerina dance to a beat, using all of their dance shapes

4a) Make two animals have a forwards and backwards conversation
Hint: Use broadcast
4b) Make it an interesting conversation with each animal speaking at least 3 times and making gestures too

5) Make 2 different balls move around on the stage
a) the first ball moves in straight lines but bounces randomly whenever it hits the edge
b) the second moves randomly, changing direction all the time

6a) One sprite chases another sprite around the stage. The first sprite moves in straight line but bounces off the edge randomly. The chasing sprite chases the first sprite but is moving slower.
b) Extension – if the chasing sprite catches the other sprite then it says something sensible and makes a suitable sound

7a) Play all the different drum sounds automatically
Hint: create a variable for the drum number
b) Extension – keep recycling through all the drum sounds automatically

8) Make a sprite gradually grow in size and then shrink
Hint: make a size variable

9a) Count down on a timer. A rocket takes off when you reach zero
Hint: Use the number icons in the letters folder
9b) Your rocket has pulsating exhaust and disappears at the top of the screen

10) Add, multiply or subtract two variable numbers
Hint: Just to do addition only you will need 4 variables: firstNum, secondNum, answer (computer calculated) and myAnswer (human calculated)

11) Variable coloured squares
a) Write a script that can draw a square of any size
Hint: Make a variable for the side length
b) Use the variable square script to draw a series of square with variable sides, with a single click
c) Now add variable pen colour and pen shade to the variable square script and use it to draw a variety of different coloured squares, with a single click

Some activity reviews

The screenshots illustrate the playback feature of the Colours activity

I asked students to download new activities from Sugar Labs. By new I mean activities not present on the default distribution of Sugar on a Stick (SoaS). We spent some time playing and then I asked students to choose one and evaluate it under the following headings:

• description of the activity
• screenshot(s)
• rating, out of 5 stars max
• Positive, Negative and Interesting features
• Age suitability
• What would the user learn from the activity

The activities we have looked at so far with links to student evaluations are listed below:

• Colours: namelessurl
• Super Brain: AirSok, GIJoe
• Billiards: Smith
• Traffic: Control-Tech-Sama, Captain Awesome
• Food Force: Sugar28, Ann
• Maze: DarkDragonZz
• Tux Paint: KingJamesFan
• Typing Turtle: ticktock
• Bar Game: SoEasyMan
• Connect4: DisplayName07
• Tangram: sreesanth007

I'll add to this blog as more reviews are completed by the students (updated 22nd and 23rd November)

realistic constructionism

I came to understand that making Shape 31 with variables was a nice challenge in real maths and understanding of the application of variables, measurement, ratio, proportion and fractions



Students in schools are invariably brought up on textbook maths and so to apply real maths to a challenge like Shape 31 is daunting for most. Hence, the need arose for me to help them scaffold this challenge, to make it more accessible to them.

I would see this as realistic constructionism, avoiding the twin errors of:
a) Just throw them off the deep end and hope that they swim. A few will but most won't
b) Not setting a real challenge through fear that they will find it too hard, just stick to the safe exercises in the textbook

The way I scaffolded it was to first demonstrate an easier shape that nevertheless required the thoughtful and not just mechanical use of variables.

In looking at the Barry Newell (BN) shapes from this perspective it becomes clear that some shapes have sides that vary (eg. rectangle) while others have sides that are all the same (eg. regular polygons such as square, triangle, pentagon etc.).

So I decided to demonstrate how to do the rectangle because the variation in the sides (2 are longer, 2 are shorter) is relatively easy to follow. So, here is is:


I then set as challenges shape 3, shape 4, shape 6 and shape 31 (all shapes here). They had to be done as follows:

"Shapes with variable sizes using the box. The variation has to work for small and large sizes"

Nevertheless, I still found that students found this hard. The following problems arose:

• using subtraction instead of or as well as multiplication and/or division. ie. not understanding that proportions or ratios alter with subtraction and do not alter when using multiplication and/or division
• trial and error instead of using measurement and knowledge of fractions or proportion

I gave direct advice about these things. Sink and swim has it's place in highly controlled or 1:1 or self directed learning environments but in a larger class is mainly irresponsible teaching. But in retrospect I could have done better and in fairly obvious ways. For example, I should have supplied rulers and more encouragement / demand for students to measure shape lengths and achieve more accuracy in proportions.

Nevertheless, one thing I discovered was that to quickly check whether the variable shapes scaled correctly was to quickly type in a very large value (eg. 1000) into the box and then see if any gaps in the shape resulted.

I asked the students to write this up in a blog. The best write up so far has been from namelessurl, especially this remark, which provides an insight into how student's often operate in ways not intended by the teacher but that a well constructed task might alter that line of least resistance:

"There were two ways to work out what values were needed in order to create a shape which could change in size and still keep it's correct dimensions. First was to use trial and error and we had to simply guess each value until we got it correct. The other way was to use mathmetics and actually calculate the values. I mostly used trial and error because i was too lazy to do the maths but in the end i found that using maths i got a much more accurate shape."

turtle art: using heading to change colours

Some of the samples in turtle art such as colors.ta and candyvortex.ta are quite spectacular visually

I want my students to explain how they work, then make some modifications and explain how the modifications worked. Here are some questions I could ask them about candyvortex:

• How does colour work? What numbers represent which colours?
• How does shade work?
• How does heading work? Which numbers represent which directions?
• What do xcor and ycor represent? Describe the co-ordinate system.
• Why does the pen thickness vary in this example?
• What happens if you rotate right rather than left?
• What happens if you vary the forward and back values?
• What happens if you take out shade?

Then I realised this would be too much all at once for some students. So I thought up an introductory exercise rather than trying to do all of the above at once. My introduction just explains one thing clearly, how can the heading can be used to set the colour. Here are the screenshots

Update 14th September:
Tony Forster has pointed out how to display the colour number without the complication of storing variables in boxes. We can do this because the fill screen tile also erases any lines drawn on the screen, whether by the turtle or the show command. The screenshot below illustrates the better method:

Also Tony has demonstrated a clever method of displaying both the colour and the shade effects in the one script. To follow this one you need to know that colours vary between 0-90 in ROYGBIV fashion and that shades vary between 0-100 with 0 darkest, 100 lightest and 50 median. Once again see the screenshot below:

turtle tricks

Armed with my Barry Newell worksheet (40 shapes challenge) I introduced Turtle Art to my students today

Some interesting things from my perspective

Shape 13: the circle
The students used arc to do that one! Shock! That defeats the purpose of the original Seymour Papert logo idea of drawing a circle with only straight lines (such as forward something) are available. I had to laugh. Still, I can set that task as a separate challenge.

Shape 17: six triangle rotated around a point
One student did that using only forwards and turns. I showed him and a couple of others how it could be done using repeats, in fact a repeat inside another repeat. His solution was about 25 tiles, mine was less than 10. So the issue of elegance is one to point out here.

Shape 38: a bunch of squares rotated around the centre of a square
Every time I use this sheet I get some students saying that have done shape 38. Invariably they haven't. Instead they have done lots of repeats with sharp (reflex) angles and it ends up looking something like shape 38. What I eventually did was show them the secret of shapes 6, 7 and 38. Namely, to first draw a square using pen up and pen down so that the turtle finishes in the middle of the square. Once you have done this for one square the more complex shapes are not too hard

Here's an example showing how to do shape 7:

more complex SVG icons

Moving on now to making SVGs which use paths to draw arcs and / or bezier curves. These are harder to do than the basic shapes but I did want to give the students the tools to do something more sophisticated.

Here are a few that I have done myself:




I ask students to complete a drawing on graph paper first since they are writing svg / xml directly, not using an inkscape or some other GUI. Doing this drawing first definitely is more efficient than trial and error.

Here is how I assessed the students for this task:

• quality of design (elegance, complexity), show graph paper (5 marks)
• icon successfully replaces XO icon (4 marks)
• colours can be reset within sugar, see page 1, point 8 (3 marks)
• cropped screenshot of your new icon posted to your blog with a description of what you have done. (4 marks)

Here is some student work. Read the student's blogs on the sidebar for more details about what they did, some problems they had and how they felt about it:
One of the interesting problems here was: A couple of students spelt "color" (American convention) "colour" (British / Australian convention) in the &fill_color; and &stroke_color; instructions. These instruction are for enabling the colour changes within Sugar. Because this was inside quotes within the xml the Opera browser (which we used for viewing the icons) error checker did not pick it up but it meant that the icon disappeared completely (not in the Opera view but in the Sugar view). This error took a while to detect. For other error checking Opera was very good.

The other main problem students had was figuring out how to use the vi editor without trashing the python file they were working on. It was important for me to have some spare SoaS sticks in this regard. I had to re flash several sticks during this exercise which was a pain for me.

update 13th September:
Another interesting problem that arose was that in Sugar svg paths for arcs don't accept decimal values. The icon ends up being smudged all over the place in a green colour. An example of something that should work but doesn't in sugar is:

< !-- Arms CREATES ERROR , paths don't take decimals in sugar, replace with beziers
<path d="M 18 35 A .5 .1 15 0 0 18 38" fill="red" stroke="&stroke_color;"/>
<path d="M 37 35 A .5 .1 -15 0 1 37 38" fill="&fill_color;" stroke="&stroke_color;"/<-->

The .5 and .1 values cause the problem. Decimal values work ok for other svg elements

physics fun

FUN IDEAS

You may work in a group. In one or two lessons make one of the following simulations and post to your blog with the alias names of your group

Build a complex or elegant building that doesn't fall down when placed on top of an earthquake simulator (see screenshot). The earthquake simulator can be modified to produce longitudinal and transverse waves

Use just links and circles to make a structurally sound Eiffel Tower

Make a see saw keep moving for as long as possible without using grab

Sorting different sized balls in to two buckets, large and small (with no jams).

Ping pong, can you make a device that hits a ball back and forth across the screen?

Make a blender

Make a puppet dance


Make a dog run

Make a piston so that balls are released one by one through an opening


Source for many of these ideas: Sugar Labs: Physics

Making your own SVGs from XML

About half my class have made SVGs using Inkscape. This time around it actually seemed more convenient to make them in raw XML. I did have to plan the sequence of operations carefully. I was very happy with how this lesson turned out because there was a lot involved. This was a double lesson, which ran for 105 minutes.

Open these programs:

• HTML Kit, to be used as an XML editor, even though it's not strictly designed for that
• Word document which contains information about how to make various basic SVG shapes using XML
• Excel to record data about SVG co-ordinates
• Opera, which is still the best standards compliant browser for viewing the SVG

1) Introduction to what SVGs are and how they are useful

2) Introduction to HTML and XML

3) Today we are going to make an SVG in raw XML. I'll take you through how to do it as a preparation for you making your own SVG to replace the Sugar XO icon.

4) Here is the picture of a cat I have drawn on a 55*55 grid. I hand out copies of a cat drawn on a 55*55 grid on graph paper. The 55*55 grid represents the size of the canvas in pixels but keep your shapes to about 40*40 otherwise they will look too big on the Sugar GUI

5) The cat consists of various shapes:

• face is a circle
• eyes are two circles
• whiskers are 4 lines
• ears are two polylines
• mouth is one polyline
• nose is a path

6) Look in the word doc and you will see how these various shapes require co-ordinates

7) I now organise the class to get into groups with each group delegated to work out the co-ordinates of the above parts and to record the information on the whiteboard. This organisaton allows everyone opportunity to practice how to work out and publicly record the co-ordinate values.

8) As the information goes up on the board I check that the values are correct and then ask everyone to record the values in Excel. I explain that soon I will need to erase the board because I need to use the data show for the next step

9) Open Icon_template.generic.svg in HTML Kit and then save that file as cat.svg. The generic file contains the xml and DOCTYPE information, the canvas size and I have already sugarised it with the ENTITY stroke_color and ENTITY fill_color statements.

10) Now your job is to make the cat by copying and pasting how to do circles, lines and polylines from the Word doc and then inserting the correct values for the cat. I start them off on this using the data show, saving in HTML Kit and viewing in Opera step by step

11) After finishing the cat it was great to see some students immediately working to improve or modify it on their own initiative

12) Before the lesson finished some students had started working on their own icon by first drawing it in a graph paper grid.

Reference: The contents of the Word doc about SVG basic shapes were based on http://xo-whs.wikispaces.com/SVG

sugar hacking

For the past couple of weeks we have been hacking sugar

I introduced them to linux as a free and open system which could be modified and that we were going to do that. I taught the students some linux command line instructions (cd pwd ls cp) and how to use them. These lessons did involve quite a lot of detailed instructions. I prepared and printed word docs beforehand to make things easier.

In one lesson we changed the desktop xo icon to look like the camera icon.

In another lesson we expanded the range of layout views for the home screen to include triangle, square and sunflower.

These tutorial are already online at the floss manuals (modifying sugar) so there is no need to repeat them here

The main problem students had was using the vi editor. A few students did wreck the favoritesview.py file and sugar wouldn't reboot. I had to reflash their USB sticks.

The next step in this process is for students to make their own SVG icon and replace the xo icon with that.

physics games screenshots

This video is from a session with Sugar at the Boston Museum of Science Computer Clubhouse by an approximately 11 year old student

mmm ... I wonder if we could make some videos like this next week of the games students have made using physics

Today the challenge again was for students to make a game in physics and then post a description and screenshot to their blogs. They could work in groups of up to three if they wanted.

Here are a couple of screenshots with abbreviated descriptions. Read the student blogs for more detail.

We called it Keep It Up!. The aim of the game is to make an any shaped object at 1.5cm starting from one of the 4 top columns, you then drop the object and try to get the bottom without touching/or atleast try not to touch the triangles. The object that touches the triangles the least wins. Players only have 4 tries (source)

The aim of the game is to draw a ball at the top of the screen and then hope it drops into one of goals at the bottom. There are three goals and each are worth either one, two or three points. The sticks and triangles in the middle of the screenshot are obstacles which rotate and spin to toss the ball around the screen. (source)

update: 21st August

STICK FIGHTERS
My game I have created is similar to a favourite game of mine Street Fighter©, a great game I’m sure most of my blog readers have heard about and played. But my version is slightly different. In my game players take turns to create a move (using the slingshot type function) and use it on the opponent or be able to drag the character and knock them out of the screen (source)

The aim of the game is to try and get three balls of any size (your choice) and using the rubber band like tool to throw the ball over the wall and get the ball to land on either of the three platforms which have points on them (5,10 and 20 points). The ball must be on one of the three long platforms in order for the point to count. Once all three balls have been thrown it is the next player's turn to throw. (source)

The goal for our game was to get the ball into the goals which are on the top right hand corner of picture. Our group all drew a ball in the far top right corner and we watched till one off the balls got in, the picture shows that moment, the orange ball almost made it but it rolled backwards and fell out (source)

bonus marks

I will post here various ways in which you can obtain bonus marks:

1) Make your own Sugar on a Stick (SoaS)

How? Sugar_on_a_Stick/Strawberry

the wow factor: Physics

For most of my students Physics has emerged as the wow factor of Sugar. This is good. Every new system needs a wow factor.

So, today I asked the students to make a game or other activity using Physics. They could work in groups of three, two or on their own. (I don't believe in forcing students to do group work). I also asked them to do a screenshot and write a description of their game or activity.

This turned into a fun lesson with some movement around the computing lab when things became exciting with some of the games that were developed. Some students asked for more time, "Can't we have a double lesson for this?" Some of the groups didn't manage to organise their blogs this time around.

No screenshots yet but look out for them in the student blogs in the next week or two.

I think the best option might be to run this again next Friday (single lesson) and leave the double lesson for new learning. It's good to have a fun activity to run on Friday, lesson 6, the final lesson of the week.

Towards the end a couple of students asked about how to "hack" Sugar. I see this as another teachable moment. I can explain how hacking is good thing and introduce them to the linux terminal.

update 8th August: Now I realise that Tony Forster planted the hacking seed in a comment he left on Mr. Unknown's blog. Also that student did try to visit the pygame site but due to school network problems :-( didn't quite get there.

Joel Stanley: Questions and Answers

Joel Stanley talked to the class yesterday. I suggested to joel beforehand that we try to make it a question and answer session and he thought it was a good idea too.

Joel is an engineering student who worked on the xo as an intern at MIT in 2007. More

Initially, the class was quite surprised when I told them of our presentation plan but they adapted alright. When the question flow dried up a little then Joel would put up one of his slides to give them a clue about what to ask next.

The student requirement was to blog the questions and answers. I notice five student blogs about this but haven't read them all yet. I just read control-tech-sama's blog and it's quite impressive

Joel owns four xos so he was able to demonstrate collaboration to the class by:
(a) two xos measuring the distance between each other
(b) a collaborative co-authoring Write activity

Later on in the lesson some students who are interested in doing engineering at Uni had a conversation with him about what that involves. Joel also talked to them about his involvement with the development of Google Chrome (Summer of Code project)

It was a great opportunity for the control tech students to get a glimpse at how cutting edge technology is developed and how following your instincts can lead to very interesting places. Many thanks to Joel for his Q&A session.

ideas arising from student blogs

I'm behind on my marking of student blogs but managed read, think about and comment on their first impressions blogs today. This enables me to spell out student requirements in more detail and also clarified for me where the students are at. Hence, through reading and thinking about their blogs I put together a list of questions for further discussion.

I am also formalizing a request to show initiative. What is initiative? Well, I can't tell you can I because if I told you it would be my initiative and not yours. Ha ha. But I can tell you that some students have already surprised me with their initiative:

control-tech-sama for writing up blog links on the weekend - something that I was intending everyone to do but he did it without asking
darkdragonzz for asking three great questions of the Timor Leste guest speakers
air sok for attracting the attention of a blogger in rwanda!!!



STUDENT REQUIREMENTS (nuts and bolts, nitty gritty)

• include paragraphs in your writing
• it is best to centre your screenshots and pictures
• setup the time zone on your blogs correctly
• go into detail in your writing, generalisations on their own are not very helpful
• setup a blog roll and leave comments on the blogs of other students
• make sure your comments option is switched on so others can leave comments

MARKS

At this stage marks are redeemable if you want to improve your mark but write me a separate blog post about it if you update an old blog

IDEAS FOR FUTURE LESSONS

1) Identify which activities you would like to explore more - give reasons - get into groups to organise this one - it's ok for one person to write for the group but make sure you identify the other group members by pseudonym

2) Get into groups and have a competition as to who can make the best game using physics
assessment: One of the students in the group posts a screenshot of the best game and writes a description of the rules, who developed it etc.

Lesson plan: Monday 3rd August

These are clarification and discussion questions that arose out of reading and thinking about student blogs:

NOT SO HARD

1. some people are saying sugar is slow and others are saying it is fast, which is true? (on our PCs, it would be a different story on the xo machine which has less RAM)
2. ability of the xo screen to turn 180 degrees - this is for book reader mode, need to demonstrate
3. what is the target audience for the xo?
4. what are the core principles of the xo project?
5. what is pippy?
6. sugar os has 4 screens: neighbourhood, groups, home, current activity (F1-F4) - we don't have the first two working yet but they should work once we setup a jabber server
7. what is the best name for the green machine? olpc, xo or $100 laptop?
8. what is the xo-2? find a picture and description of it

HARDER QUESTIONS

1. What are the different variants of linux? Is linux a serious threat to windows? why? why not?
2. what is an operating system (os)? examples? characteristics? is sugar an os? what is the purpose of an os? is sugar simple or simplistic?
3. what type of games should there be on educational software?
4. who is joel stanley, look him up on the internet, he will be our next guest

from sugar to blogger

Friday 31st July:
The goal of the lesson today is to access the internet and your blog login (blogger.com) through Sugar.

Read this blog to see how to connect to the internet: Connecting to the internet through SoaS

Then open an activity that you like or want to explore today. Do something using the activity and then take a screenshot (Prt Scr key). Do enough to make the screenshot interesting. The screenshot will appear in the Journal. Remember, the Journal saves everything.

Now upload the screenshot to your blog by clicking on the Add Image icon in blogger. The Choose File or Browse button will take you to the Sugar journal, so then just click on the Screenshot and Save in Blogger.

Also write a description of the activity you used today, the more detail in your description the better.

I have modelled the process I want you to follow below:



Here is a screenshot of the Calculator activity calculating tan 45

I found out that the Calculator has algebraic, trigonometric and boolean features.

There seems to be an error in the trigonomety because tan 45 = 1.62 whether set on degrees or radians. That is correct for radians but it should change to tan 45 = 1.0000 for degrees. On the SoaS version the degrees / radians button is found under the Miscellaneous tab. Maybe I am missing something but it seems to me to be a bug in this version of Calculator.

Timor Leste presentation

I asked Rosemary and David Rowe to present to the class about their recent visit to Timor Leste. David and I are part of a group which is looking at introducing some xos to Timor Leste (Seaton OLPC Users Group), aka East Timor.

Rosemary was the main presenter and she did a great job of intermingling both the socio-economic situation with various computing initiatives originating from missionary and Non Government Organisations (NGOs). The students were a wonderful attentive audience and took a lot of notes. I told them they have to type up a report, with some images from Rosemary's slides, of the presentation by Friday and mentioned the dreaded homework word. From the sidebar I notice that some drafts have gone up already. It's a good class.

Thank you, Rosemary and David :-)

course outline

YEAR 10 CONTROL TECH ASSESSMENT PLAN
SACE Stage 1 assessment plan summary

FOCUS AREA: Systems and Control Products
CONTEXT: Computer Systems

OVERALL TASK SUMMARY: Produce and evaluate a software product for a real audience that could be used to help explain the potential of the XO and / or Sugar to help educate the children in developing countries

MORE DETAILED

1) Investigate the xo hardware and Sugar software and explain its social potential (20%)

Student communication: blog, photos

2) Investigate and critically analyse the different types of Sugar software (20%)

Student communication: blog, screenshots

3) With a partner document your plans to make a software product using some part or parts of the Sugar software. After you have made it you will then use your software product to explain the power of the xo or Sugar to another student or students (not in this class) (20%)

Student communication: wiki

4) Make the software product, with your partner. Then present what you have made with an explanation to both peers (not in this class) and the teacher for evaluation. Part of the marks will be awarded for the amount of skill involved in the final product. (40%)

Student communication: wiki, evaluation sheet

connecting to internet through SoaS

If you don't know by now what SoaS stands for: Sugar on a Stick

HOW TO CONNECT TO THE INTERNET THROUGH SUGAR ON OUR SCHOOL PCs

Open Browse (it's a Sugar activity)
in the address bar type: about:config
In the Filter box type: proxy

Double click on the following and set these values:
network.proxy.http 10.60.184.54
network.proxy.http_port 8080
network.proxy.ssl 10.60.184.54
network.proxy.sll_port 8080
network.proxy.type 1

10.60.184.54 is the IP address of our school proxy server

Now try to connect to the internet

You should now be able to write your blogger blogs and play with Sugar at the same time.

Thanks to phoozle for help with this

saving Write files to a second USB stick

At this early stage I want the students to explore the Sugar OS and Activities and then write about what they have discovered in their blogs.

Problem:
For Mondays lesson (27th July) I didn't have internet access through Sugar on a Stick (SoaS). Also at this stage collaboration is not working out of the box (will discuss this later).

So my plan was for students to record their impressions in Write and then transfer that file to their own USB stick so that they had text as a basis for a future blog. Apart from this requirement they were free to explore whatever they wanted.

I did a review of these basics:

• F3 Home
• F4 Current activity
• Point the mouse pointer to a corner to show the Frame which contains the journal icon, the icons of open activities and other useful information (even the IP address of your computer!)
• Everything is saved automatically in the Journal - showed them how to access the journal
• Hover over icons to obtain options such as Quit
• Favourites View and List View options from Home screen

I asked them to open Write and to begin to record some impressions.

Here is how to save your Write file on a second USB stick

What I found out (afterwards) is that the Default save is in ODT format. Since we don't actually have Open Office installed on all machines at my school then this is an issue for when we swap back to our Windows environment. Just checked then, Word is unfriendly to the ODT format in line with their tradition of sabotaging open standards. This provides me with another opportunity to talk about the hostility of MS to open standards.

Click Activity tab, hover over the icon, wait until the RTF option appears and save as an RTF. Then navigate to the Journal, find the RTF file, click on the corresponding arrow on the right hand side (RHS). Then hover over the Copy icon, wait until your second USB icon appears and click on that. This will save the file to your second USB.

This workaround provided a good opportunity to show the students some of the features of the Sugar system, that the USBs can be seen in the Frame, that you can copy files to a USB through the Sugar GUI (Linux Terminal not required)

Footnotes:
In a future lesson I will point out that this same method can be used to transfer a screen shot to their own USB stick. Just press the Prt Scr key to take the screenshot.

The main activity that students are playing with is Physics. Initially they just played with the gravity feature. Some of them made games with Physics. In this last lesson they were using the motor feature. We tried to save a Physics screen but it did not save, sadly. This will limit what we can do with it.

xo and sugar first impressions

This is the teacher's blog for a year 10 class somewhere in South Australia in second semester 2009 investigating the potential of the xo and sugar software

Check out the sidebar for student's first impressions