I’ve been hearing about Squeak and decided to have a look at it myself. All was fine using Synaptic for downloading and installing. The default font size I found too small for me to easily read so this was quite frustrating. I couldn’t work out what to do with the program so went online looking for help! After completing the “Drive A Car” tutorial on the squeakland.org website I was much more able to navigate this new environment. Jessica had less difficulties than I did. I also found where to increase the font size so that I could read everything better! 🙂 I often end up closing the program and opening it again because I get myself so lost. I’m looking for familiar things like the ‘File menu’ – new – open – close – save etc. Jess did the “Drive A Car” project too, as I said, with fewer hassles than me. We both installed the Squeak web browser plugin so that we could play with the online projects on the squeakland.org website too.

Where to now? I found some more tutorials on squeakland.org and also joined their mailing list. Next for Jessica is to make her car drive on a road!

Via the Squeak mailing list I found Bill Kerr’s blog (which I’d read bits of before) with his experiences with Squeak. His Guide to learning etoys/Squeak and The frustrating but eventually successful search for etoy resources are proving helpful as well as his links to further information. I had similar experiences and frustrations to Bill with not being able to find things on the squeakland.org website. Bill’s obviously gone a lot further in learning Squeak than I have yet. Perhaps it would be better if I got Jessica to teach me instead of me trying to learn it and then teach her. LOL

This is my car and its viewer showing the car’s properties. This is all in the Drive A Car tutorial about how to make the car move etc.

Now I’ve drawn a road and made the car travel along the road. Having lots of fun! I want to find out how Jess can publish and share her Squeak creations online too.