As a teacher at the Open Charter School where Constructivism is the foundation of our approach to education, it is important to find ways that allow our students to experiment with and construct concrete examples from their knowledge.

Squeak is an open source, authoring tool for children as well as adults. It's creation has been the dream of Alan Kay, president of ViewPoints Research, for many years. He has always wanted to help children learn to think better and deeper than most adults. Squeak was created as the medium, which would serve as a new kind of electronic paper that would hold new ways to represent powerful ideas. The EToy part of this program is only a small part of Squeak's capabilities

Squeak's Etoy component allows me to move my students from abstract ideas to more concrete ones by helping them create simulations that characterize their thinking about math into other disciplines. It gives them a chance to explore and play with their ideas without risk and with immediate feedback. It also allows them to create tools that become building blocks for other tools.

The approach I take with my students is rather simple. After giving them some of the basics for getting around in Squeak, I pose a problem for them to solve, give them the tools they need to solve it, and then up the ante by posing a challenge to them which takes the problem to a more difficult level. This approach gets them practicing, exploring and spotting errors in their logic as they work through the problems. They are wonderful in collaborating with each other and often learn quicker from this collaboration than from me, which is always very exciting.

Squeak is a wonderful tool not only for exploring math, but for creating science simulations and animations. My students have used Squeak to create simulations that express their understanding of variables, random numbers, feedback, heading, if/then statements, the power of increase by, positive and negative numbers, acceleration, movement on the x,y coordinates, geometry, mean, and gravity.

The Squeak plugin that you need to download is available free at the following URL: http://www.squeakland.org/. Squeak is both Mac and Windows compatible.