"Lex Spoon" lex@cc.gatech.edu wrote:
Have you tried "gearing down" the stearing wheel: dividing the amount in the "turn by" command by 3 (or so) ? It makes it much easier. :)
Haven't played with that much, although I was thinking I might modify it to make the car's heading the same as the wheel's heading (not as much like a real steering wheel, but easier to manage from a top-down perspective).
I should have done this first, actually. We played around a lot with the sound recorder. The kids love the reverb on the recorder. Everytime they hear their voices echoing back at them they shout even louder into the mike. It was a total hoot - managed to get some goodies to send to the grandparents but could only externalize as a .wav file. Be nice to have .mp3, but oh well.
Anyhow, we modified the script to get the kids voices to shout out whenever the cars crashed into each other. I wasted more time trying to get them to steer into each other than I did actually writing the scripts. Got stung by some weirdness (okay, only weird if you're not a Smalltalker :) when I renamed 'Car' to 'Yellow Car' (mnu #Car). Allowing spaces in names is a pain, but it would be nice to have a clean way of supporting them (possibly one could make spaces translate into something else -- given the assignment operator, underscores are probably not a good choice :) [Question: is allowing non-breaking spaces as part of valid identifiers an option? If someone is editing a name and they hit the space bar it could just drop one of those in].
Having two controls would be good. I loaded up the SpaceWar EToy from Bob's SuperSwiki, but it's not as fun when you're playing by yourself. I am intrigued by "Telemorphic" (saw the menu, have only a vague idea what it is, but it sounds great), but I want to use Squeak for doing stuff with my kids right now. I think that computers can be quite isolating and conventional PCs are hard to integrate into a social environment (prolly also true for pair programming). Rather than multi-user network capabilities, I'm starting to think that maybe I should try and get some external game controllers to hook up to the USB. Anyone know what it would take to get Squeak to work with these? It would be cool to click on a joystick morph and tell it, "you are connected to this controller now".
A major point of frustration (moreso for my 2-year-old than for the 3-year-old -- it's amazing the difference in dexterity even though people often think they're twins) is dealing with the keyboard and the left/right/middle mouse button thing. I want to trash both devices. A single-button mouse would be better. Maybe a G4 iMac with OSX for the kitchen (when they come out). Must keep the kiddies away from Windows as long as possible :)
So my son is now at the point where if he sees me reading mail in Celeste, he will pull himself up (push me out of the way), navigate into the Games world and start playing with the toothpaste game. The lesson for me is that two years ago, when I first started using Squeak I thought that the "non-standard" UI was a terrible weakness. I was wrong, and I have been proven wrong in an utterly convincing way (by a 3-year-old who has absolutely no use for the marketing rhetoric of the computer industry :).
Overall, thanks for sharing your experiences -- I've found them an interesting read!
Thanks. I appreciate the encouragement.
Cheers, Steve
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