Bert,

I did a Squeak booth for the 2nd year running at the SoCal Linux Expo 2007 in Feb in L.A. This year we generated a lot more interest as we were promoting the Squeak robotics program that my organization, the Hawthorne Center for Innovation, is going to be launching soon -- and I can attest that many geeks will come over and see what's what and give you their contact info if robotics is involved. We also did a Birds of a Feather session that was well attended entitled: "A New Kind of Robotics with Squeak"

BTW, I plugged LASTUG (Los Angeles Smalltalk User Group) - www.lastug.org and a few people are starting to trickle in to the monthly meetings who heard about it at the Hawthorne Center booth at the Expo.

I run the Hawthorne Center for Innovation - www.hawcenter.org (bare with me, the site is being reworked). We are out in the Riverside / San Beranrdino area of Southern Californa. The Hawthorne Center is in a room behind my house. I have 10 computers set up and have been working with about 20 kids (ages 10 - on up) for the last year who are being introduced to Squeak 3.8.

I and Ben Cooper - the Center is acting as a tech incubator for projects Ben is developing - found out about Squeak in Sept 2005. I bumped into "Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots" (thank you, Stephane!!) on the internet. I immediately ordered the book. I was very excited because, even though I couldn't understand a word of what Stephane was writing about, it looked like it would now be possible to get open source software (that kids could easily learn to program in - at least that is what I kept reading) and robotics together. Ben taught himself Squeak (from all the books we could round up) and started teaching it in April 2006. Since there is precious little documentation for how to start from absolute zero he had to create a lecture series from scratch - and ask questions at LASTUG.

The class started out as an introduction to programming with Squeak so that the kids could write code for robots but has morphed into a group that is helping Ben to build a universal interface for all future robotics. Soon, the kids are going to start learning screencasting so that we can make video tutorials about how to code in Squeak for all the other abolute beginner kids and (moms) out there who want to get involved with our up-coming robotics program. We will be posting them to Hawthorne Center website as they get made.

Donna

----- Original Message ----- From: "Bert Freudenberg" bert@freudenbergs.de To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list" squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 11:59 AM Subject: Re: Squeak History

On Mar 27, 2007, at 20:03 , Chris Cunnington wrote:

...

Hi All,

The PR Team is putting together a press release about the Squeak booth at Smalltalk Solutions. (We're also working on one about the Squeak gold/silver badge campaign starting at the end of this month.) We need to know something from the collective memory of Squeakers: is a booth for Squeak at a trade show/convention unprecedented?

There has been a Squeak booth at LinuxTag in Germany at least as far back as 2002:

http://www.pro-linux.de/berichte/lt2002/linuxtag2002.html

• Bert -