Etoys Game Guidance  (2010-Jan-19 21:47 EST)

by <>  (2010-Sep-03 7:42 EDT)

I would prefer if children should use copies from simular objects, like "forward 5" should be there and no "forward -5", and with a copy and changing the 5 to -5 should the child make the "forward -5".
In this way it would be really a thinking and not only finding the right position of every command.

by <>  (2010-Sep-03 7:42 EDT)

Thanks Mr. Steve, thanks Yoshiki, your joint effort was required to convince me to take the time and and effort to go through the complete process of the challenge.

The secret is very old but we tend to forget it. By concentrating in one small portion of Etoys at a time, I believe I will master it. The whole thing could be a bit scaring but, after today I believe I can take more advantage of keyboard input.

by <>  (2010-Sep-03 7:42 EDT)

rpb,

Thank you for the comment. Perhaps this discussion should be kept at the Steve's version, but I think the focus of the original is in fact avoid the complexity of needing to change the number part of tiles. I surely think that another "course" of how to manipulate the number an expression would be good.

But having children do both from the beginning may not be so good; A problem is that small difference in number does not make real difference (forward by 9 and forward by 10 are pretty much the same) but if we suggest kids to select a good number, many kids would stick with meaningless number fiddling and don't see the real problem.

So, I think your suggestion is good after a novice understand one thing, but this one's focus is one step before.

by <>  (2010-Sep-03 7:42 EDT)

Hi, Carlos,

It is great that you take time and go through it. But, this is still fairly complex... I sure hope that projects with similar complexity with my (Mr. Yokoyama's) censored Roulette project (but still a lot to tinker with) populate the site.

by <>  (2010-Sep-03 7:42 EDT)

rpb, good suggestion. I will think about how to incorporate it in another project.

Yoshiki, many thanks for your scripts!!!

I am curious about your comment to Carlos that "this is still fairly complex" perhaps it is because I understand the problem space and created the project, but I have tested this on kids as young as 8 (he was a bright 8 year old and had done a number of other Etoys projects) and they have been able to complete the goals. True they do get stuck a bit on Step 4 and need some help with the viewer and finding things, but once they figure that out, they seem to do okay.

Also, given that kids are motivated to create games, I think they will try harder. That said, I may be fooling myself (won't be the first or last time).

I am thinking about how we can test how kids use these tutorials. I would be curious as to what others observe when using this with children. Also I hope to think about ways to incorporate "Stealth feedback" where we have some more "specially scripted tiles" to detect how long it takes kids to reach the goals, the kinds of mistakes they make, if they give up et al.
Ideally then have the results (anonymous of course) emailed back to me when kids use the project. This could give us objective feedback (and hopefully a larger sample size) on how the projects are being used and serve as a basis for improvements.

by <>  (2010-Sep-03 7:42 EDT)

Hi, Steve,

The complexity I was referring to was not for the "user's" but for the creators of such projects. If somebody wants to add another "step" (like you did from the original version), it requires the knowledge of a lot of Etoys techniques, or learning them. I know that Carlos is making "kid's material type" projects in a way of his own learning projects; so I thought that for Carlos, these techniques used behind the scene may not obvious ones in that setting.

by <>  (2010-Sep-03 7:42 EDT)

This is a wonderful way to learn etoys. I have used it to teach students, and love the progression. It teaches many useful concepts, and challenges their thinking. I highly recommend this as a teaching/learning tool.

by <>  (2010-Sep-03 7:42 EDT)

One think that would be good for make the automatic mentoring a bit better is to be able to analyze the current user script more easily and meaningful way. We could write OMeta pattern matching rules against the structure created by the #phrases method and extract information about the script.

(Then one would imagine to have an end-user friendly version of OMeta like pattern matcher...)