Friday, August 3, 2007

Ji-Young Kim Explains "Empowering Teachers With Squeak" at Squeakfest

Ji-Young Kim, a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign shared her work researching professional development programs, facilitators and teachers. Her research focused on the integration of technology with a first grade teacher (case study) that utilized Squeak to teach science. Her findings underscored the importance of the role of the facilitator in professional development especially with technology that's new to them such as Squeak. The use of Squeak bolstered that teacher's pedagogical content knowledge by requiring thought about the connections between the science and Squeak, incorporating decision making, expanding the the teacher's view of the use of Squeak in other subjects, and insights into a deeper understanding of science concepts.
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Otowa and Takada Share "A Squeak Project Sharing System Through

Tadayuki Otowa and Hideyuki Takada of Ritsumeikan University in Japan shared their work in a system that allows students working on Squeak projects to easily share their work and collaborate using Smart Cards.

Smart Cards are memory devices that include a processor which is powered and can be read and written to via radio waves. They have a 128 Byte capacity. Students using the cards can drag an object they create to a smart card flap which is written to the card. They then, can pass the card to a fellow student who passes the card over the reader to load the object. The system also allows interfacing with SuperSwiki and SuperPartsBin.
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Offray Luna Cardenas Presents "Collective Problem Solving Using Squeak"

Offray Luna Cardenas of the Javeriana University in Columbia, South America made a presentation describing his research on multiagent models and collective problem solving in the classroom using Squeak as a medium. The goal was for his students to collaboratively create a "Lemmings-style" game using the Squeak environment. His research studies how the students interact do achieve this. Furthermore, he uses Squeak to model this collaborative behavior.
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Harness, Smith, and Snir Present "Curriculum Applications of Squeak" at Squeakfest 07.

Kathleen Harness, Kathleen Smith, and Avigail Snir of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign presented a variety of uses for Squeak in the k-5 Curriculum. Using a variety of projects from the areas of mathematics, science, and language arts, the presenters showed how Squeak can effectively model a variety of concepts effectively allowing students to experiment in a way that allows discovery learning. Their website includes about 40 projects that act as tutorials for using Squeak, as well as a number of Squeak projects for students.

Visit the Squeak CMI site at: http://squeakcmi.org.
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Thursday, August 2, 2007

Tadashi Yokokama Shares "Squeak for First Grade and Beyond" at Squeakfest 07

Tadashi Yokokama of the Suginami Wada Elementary School in Japan presented his work with Squeak with elementary students. His presentation is available as a Squeak image here.
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Barry and Patrick Kayton Present Kusasa at Squeakfest 07

Barry and Patrick Kayton of The Shuttleworth Foundation presented Kusasa, which will serve as a resource for educators and students worldwide. They are using Squeak to enhance modelling with students in grades 4-9 as part of the project. To learn more about their work, visit http://www.kusasa.org.
A .pdf of their presentation can be found here.
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Alan Kay - "One Laptop per Child - A Call for Content" - Squeakfest 2007

Alan Kay, of the Viewpoints Research Institute presented the keynote address at Squeakfest 2007. Alan suggested the revolutionary nature of the personal computer was on par with the printing press in its ability to reshape society, however, he expressed concern that since the days of the Dynabook, though the PC has advanced considerably, the user interface has not. Citing Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death," he suggests that there is little worthwhile content in our media-rich environment. With the advent of the OLPC (aka "The $100 Laptop"), millions of children in developing countries could easily obtain a functional personal computer. System software along with authoring, scripting, and interface issues are somewhat easily overcome hurdles, however effective "Powerful Ideas" curriculum and particularly a network of qualified mentors will be particularly challenging.

To visit Viewpoints Research Institute, go to http://www.vpri.org/.
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SooJin Jun Presents "The Power of Etoys in Teaching Programming Skills"

SooJin Jun of the Korea University presented her reasons why Squeak is an excellent way of introducing programming in the K-12 curriculum. Benefits of Squeak include its cost-effectiveness (It's Open-Source... Free!), readily adopted by students, and fun! SooJin is actively involved in teacher technology training allowing teachers in training to use Squeak and subsequently their students. She has used Squeak in both a University Creativity Class as well as in the Korean Public Schools. Students in her work plan their Squeak eToys prior to creation using planning sheets. Teachers she has worked with report a high rate of satisfaction using Squeak and continue to use it with their students.

You can learn more about their work at:
http://algo.squeak.kr and http://squeak.kr
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Squeakfest 07 - Madhur Shrestha - "Squeak, Constraints & Possibilities"

Madhur Shrestha of the SeaGate Institute of Technology made Day Two's second presentation on his work with Nepalese and Japanese students in Nepal using Squeak. Students created projects in Squeak and shared them via the Net and with the assistance of web cams at the International Squeak Live Video Conference. Participating students had a very active role throughout the conference making presentations, introducing speakers, sharing in cultural dance, and of course, sharing the Squeak projects.

In Nepal, the limitations of bandwidth, accessibility, and training for teachers in Squeak are constraining, though many opportunities exist for collaboration, software and support to schools, advance training in Squeak.

More information on the conference can be found here:
http://squeakland.org/pdf/squeak_nepal.pdf
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Randy Caton at Squeakfest 07 - Using Squeak to Teach Physics

Randy Caton made the morning's first presentation demonstrating many Etoys he's developed that effectively demonstrate some of the more challenging concepts in physics. Many of Randy's Squeak projects are used by Nasa for web-based physics teaching. Examples demonstrated include Etoys for falling objects, buoyancy/fluid density, and perspectives in rotating coordinate systems. His work can be seen at http://www.pcs.cnu.edu/~rcaton/squeak.html.
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Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Stowe, Scarlata, and Stowe-Grant Share Squeak Gardens at Squeakfest 2007

Carol Ann Stowe and Valerie Scarlata from Columbia College Chicago along with Elspeth Stowe-Grant of the University of Chicago Laboratory School demonstrated the way they've been using Squeak to teach preK-1st Graders Art. In their previous work the team has researched using Squeak as a media-authoring environment for such projects as mosaics, a Martin Luther King audio collage, and a study of Matisse. The Squeak Garden project began with children visiting the University Greenhouse to sketch plants. The children later explored other media (block prints, acrylics, etc.) to create flower art.

On the hardware side, their research utilized the Tablet PC, of which they noted the children immediately adapted to with almost no learning curve and more freeform creativity.

Their presentation can be found here: http://imamp.colum.edu/eceim/squeakfest07/blog/cccSqueakGardens.zip.
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Masashi Umezawa Demonstrates SuperSwiki2 at Squeakfest 07

In the afternoon session of Squeakfest 2007 (Day 1), Masashi Umezawa demonstrated SuperSwiki2 by walking workshop participants through a download and setup of the application. SuperSwiki2 was designed in an attempt to streamline the sharing of e-Toys projects. SuperSwiki2 allows Squeak users to create an e-Toy, and upload it to a SuperSwiki server directly from Squeak which can then be accessed by other Squeak users. Additionally, the system allows users to comment on uploaded projects, searching capabilities, a bulletin board system, an RSS, and a Wiki that are all accessible via the user's browser. Administrators of SuperSwiki2 servers have additional controls that allow them to control how users interface and interact with their server. Masashi is currently seeking individuals who are willing to create language translations for SuperSwiki2.
Find out more about SuperSwiki2 at: http://swikis.ddo.jp/SuperSwiki2/3
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Scott Wallace Demonstrates Squeak Scripts at Squeakfest 07

In the second session of Squeakfest 07 (Day 1), Scott Wallace demonstrated some useful scripting tips in the Etoys/OLPC version of Squeak. One of the challenges when doing complex modeling, such as Scott's example of a mother whale having a baby whale at a certain age, can be challenging. Having an object create a sibling is simple, but how do we differentiate it from the parent? Scott showed techniques that allowed one object, for example, the mother whale, to send messages to a sibling whale (the baby), setting its parameters (ie., color, width, motion) to be different from the parent object. These sorts of techniques have many applications in biological modeling.
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Yoshiki Ohshima Presents the OLPC at Squeakfest 07

Yoshiki Ohshima presented at the first session today, the OLPC. Reiterating Alan Kay's call for content, Yoshiki recounted the development of the OLPC and Negroponte's vision for the laptop. The goal is education in the developing world rather than to simply produce a cheap laptop. The hardware and software is essentially in place, though content for applications such as Squeak Etoys is needed. The laptop, often referred to as "the $100 laptop," is currently coming in at around $175, though costs are expected to drop to the $100 range in 2008. One of the most amazing features of the OLPC is the 1200 x 900 display that uses 1/7 of the power and has 1/3 the cost of traditional LCD displays. Additionally, the OLPC includes wireless functionality based on the 802.11s (mesh network).

You can download his presentation here: http://imamp.colum.edu/eceim/squeakfest07/blog/YoshikiOLPCPresentationSF07.zip
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Touchdown in Chicago

Our flight landed yesterday evening at Chicago O'Hare around 5:00PM CST. We were surprised to find that finding a cab to the motel was a bit challenging. Fortunately, a gentlemen with a limousine service provided us with transportation. According to him, about 90% of the local taxi drivers are on strike. My wife and I had the opportunity to sample our first Chicago-style pizza, and it was great. And now, Squeakfest!
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Monday, July 23, 2007

Looking Ahead to Squeakfest 07

Well, I'm gearing up for Squeakfest 07! The USeIT team is gracious enough to be sending me as a representative of our project. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to learn more about how Squeak is being used and ready to gather ideas to take back to our project. This will also be the first trip to Chicago for my wife and I, so we're really excited about that. Here's a satellite image of the location of Squeakfest 07 and the surrounding area. For more detail, you can visit this Google Maps link.


-Lucas
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