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notes-2-02

2 February 2005

Today, there were 3 items on the itinerary:
1. Look at some standards
2. Point to some ideas for activities
3. Do some Squeak exercises

First, Prof. Pitt told us of some new developments regarding the future of the class. The C & I class with whom we were going to collaborate was cancelled due to lack of enrollment. There are, however, several local teachers who are interested in working with us, including

  • Kathleen Harness at Dr. Howard Elementary School
  • Kathleen Smith, a math teacher at Champaign Central High
  • George Reese with MSTE
  • Barbara Hug, a Curriculum & Instruction professor in the Ed College.
  • Marty Stambaugh, a science teacher at Countryside Middle School.
  • Craig Russell, a math teacher at Uni High


Ms. Harness is interested in drawing people together to form a Squeak community. We were told that Barbara Hug may monitor the class at some point, and that we also may have students visit the class. We discussed how we could address questions from students by email, such as having one row of students in our class answer questions each week and having a FAQ page for more common problems.

A question was posed: What tutorials should come after painting, handles, and the car? No answer was reached, but we were encouraged to continue thinking about this. Also, Prof. Pitt told us about How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, referred to him by Kathleen Harness, which are available online using Python and Java.

Prof. Pitt showed us a "draft of a draft of the standards" that will be posted to the swiki at some point. During some down time, we discussed problems with publishing. Some people have a hard time publishing: it takes too long or doesn't work at all. A couple of suggestions were made. First, make sure you're publishing locally (by holding the publish button and choosing "Publish As ..." on the menu). This will take much less time than uploading. Also, the trash object maintains the objects put into it until it is emptied, so you may be publishing more than you think. It was also noted that alt-period or command-period halts whatever Squeak is doing.

There was also a discussion about scripting. If you pause a script, when it starts again it must start from the beginning. If you need to make a recursive call that ends before your current script finishes, use the script name. This led to some questions of how a loop can be implemented in serially into a script.

We then looked at objectives for level II CS education, which will be posted. These objectives included:

  • Computer basics
  • Networking concepts
  • Problem Solving
  • Programming
  • The internet
  • Web design
  • Multimedia (including exercises
  • Connections to math
  • Models of intelligent behavior
  • Broad interdisciplinary use of computers
  • Careers
  • Ethics and security


Prof. Pitt recommended The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, a computer game that could be used to teach CS concepts to children. We looked at mathmaniacs.org, which has some interesting CS topics made teachable to kids, as does another resource page. We looked briefly at the Computer Science Teachers Association acm page, where you can see the model curriculum and soon (within a week) a mission statement relating to level II CS education.

Finally, we were encouraged to post projects to the swiki that solve or demonstrate interesting issues we find.