meeting Pierre-André Dreyfuss

Pierre-André Dreyfuss wrote to me while holidaying in Australia and with the help of lucychili we organised a meeting with him last Wednesday in Adelaide.

He is short, with greying hair and black bushy eyebrows

Pierre-André has an intensive background in logo, microworlds, toontalk, etoys / squeak and loves to talk about programs he has done in them. He is a very committed and dedicated educator.

It was fairly amazing meeting someone from another country whose programming software passions were pretty much parallel to my own.

Pierre-André is Swiss and his preferred language is French. It was difficult to understand the detail of some of the conversation due to his strong accent, although his English vocabulary is quite good. eg. see this post about toontalk and etoys to the squeakland forum

He is the author of vtoys, a visual drag and drop program designed to make etoys more accessible to younger and disadvantaged students. Pierre-André asked us for help in an English translation. My friend Paul has done some work already by taking the documentation from the French language site and running it through google translate. The English output is fairly good,

Here is a v-toys page in French, translated into English using google translate.

Update: I have updated the translation in English URL, as Tony pointed out the earlier one was temporary. You have to quickly grab the URL while google translate is translating. Thanks Paul.