Skip to main content

New Environment for "Programming with Kids"

I was psyched to see the Etoys 4.0 release last week. It's been a while since I looked at Squeakland so I took some time to play with it last weekend. I am directing a hands-on exploratory session called "Programming with Kids" this Saturday at Iowa Code Camp 4 and Etoys will definitely be the jumping off spot.

I'll be using the Etoys to Go package. This is a nicely packaged environment that runs your code portably across Windows, Mac, and Linux without installation. You can put it on a flash drive, plug it in, and go. Save your work, switch to another computer and go. Etoys to Go is a much better name than the old "One-click image" since it really has little to do with the image or how many clicks it takes.

In addition to eToys, I'll be mixing in some examples from Ducasse's great book, "Learn Programming with Robots," and from the Seaside web application framework.

I just finished testing the distribution on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu. I'll be putting it on media to hand out at the conference and I'll post a download link here soon.

Updated:

Download the ZIP here and expand to any folder on Windows, Macintosh, or Linux:
http://bit.ly/4khd83

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Refactoring – Ruby Ed.

The original Refactoring book by Martin Fowler had a big impact on how I thought about writing software. I’d used the refactoring tools in Smalltalk, but the book changed the way I thought about refactoring and gave names to many new refactorings. This Ruby edition of the book is highly anticipated. I received my copy at a drawing in our local Ruby user’s group. Part of the deal was you had to write a review (you are reading it) in exchange for the book. Nearly everyone at the meeting wanted a crack at the book. The authors suggest that if you have the original work, you probably shouldn’t purchase this new edition. I don’t agree. There is plenty of new content with around 20 new refactorings and a few new code smells to make the difference worthwhile. There is a tremendous amount of thoughtful Ruby code snippets inserted throughout the text. In fact, this is one of those books that is great for everyone on a team to have a copy. It is the kind of book that can be used to raise t...

Hands-on Microformats: Quickly build an hCalendar-based view with XSLT and Seaside

I gave a talk with the title, "Hands-on Microformats: Quickly build an hCalendar-based view" at the 2009 BarCamp Omaha . Since the presentation was really looking at code, I didn't have a slide deck. So I thought I would share my notes in a series of posts. This is the first. Short version: By adding a few specific attributes and abiding by some date formatting rules, you can generate a great-looking monthly calendar with surprisingly little effort. That is, get something like this: From HTML that looks like this: A microformat lets you use standard XHTML but add in some semantic goodness without resorting to a separate XML namespace and corresponding set of tags (or formally, an XML application ). For our example, hCalendar uses a 1:1 representation of standard iCalendar ( RFC2445 ) VEVENT properties and values in semantic XHTML . hCalendar wouldn't have caught my attention if it weren't for js-hCalendar . This bit of JavaScript created by David Glasser and ho...

Iowa Code Camp 5 on May 1, 2010

The site is still showing ICC4 info, but the countdown clock has been updated to a new date! Looks like I need to free up a spring day for some hacking! While browsing the site, found a picture of me presenting Seaside at ICC4. The book in the picture is Learning Programming with Robots. I think I was answering a question about Alice.