2006 project ideas
Croquet is a very interesting system that should be fun to play with.It is not very stable, so people who are not used to working with
experimental software might get frustrated. But it is very cool.
You are of course free to invent your own projects with Croquet.
I bet it would be fun to make a game with it. But I have two more
concrete ideas.
The first is to use its 3D abilities to make a 3D programming environment.
How could browsers, inspectors or debuggers make use of 3D? It is very easy
to make programming tools for Smalltalk. The browser, debugger and inspector
are just normal Smalltalk objects. So, the hard part of this project is figuring out
how to make 3D useful, not actually programming a browser.
The second is to use Croquet's collaboration facilities to make a better way
of recording lectures. I'd like a lecture to be a recording inside Squeak. I'd
record my actions in Squeak and also record my voice. Croquet has a way
of ensuring that the same set of actions on two different computers will be
guaranteed to give the same result. Every event from the outside world is
time-stamped and played at the approprate time on all machines that are
part of the same "tea party". In theory, the stream of events can be stored on
the disk and replayed later, though I learned that that feature hasn't been
implemented yet. I was also told that voice recording is too inefficient to be
used this way, because the entire lecture becomes a single very large file.
It ought to be broken into smaller chunks, perhaps at points where there are
pauses. Or maybe the voice should be stored on a server somewhere and
the object in Croquet could be a small object that knows it location. In any
case, it should be possible to start up a Croquet recording and not have it
take a long time before you see and hear something.
See Info on Croquet
E-toys is a package that is part of Squeak that is aimed at teaching children to program.
You write a program by connecting tiles. If you search on the web you can find a lot about it, though often it is just called "Squeak". For example, see http://squeakland.org".
Professor Lennie Pitt has been using it to teach children to program, and he has a
bunch of things he'd like to change about it. So, another project would be to add the
features that he wants.
Over the years, about half a dozen groups have implemented the "alternate reality kit".
It makes a great class project. You can find a video of it at
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- Class projects last edited on 2 April 2008 at 5:20:59 pm by vpn3-144241.near.uiuc.edu