Epaath

merging from other Nepal Etoys and Epaath pages 08:54, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Epaath is the set of localized Etoys activities being developed by OLE Nepal for inclusion in their NEXO builds. You can get the latest Epaath release on dev.laptop.org by clicking this link.

The developers are working hard on their growing pilot program, and need all the help that we can get. If you want to help out, you can help test these activities by logging bug reports and suggesting feature enhancements in the Nepal-specific online bug-tracking system. Please see the open issues section below or contact the Nepal team directly.

History

These activities used to be called E-Paati but the kids started calling the XO itself E-Paati so we had to change the name to E-Paath or Epaath, which means 'E-lesson'.

You can see a brief history at the OLE Nepal Etoys page.

Using Epaath

Downloading and customization

We have augmented the standard Etoys image a bit so it satisfies some of our specific needs. Instructions on how to make a fully fledged Epaath image is described on the Epaath image customization page.

Instructions on how to load individual Epaath activities from a remote or local server are described below.

Loading Epaath activities from a browser

To load Epaath activities from within a browser on Linux, one needs to do the following things:

- On a non-XO machine, download the Squeak browser plugin from Squeakland

- Get a copy of Epaath.

- For now, patch your Etoys image with this patch. Save the Image.

as root:
- link the Epaath Squeak image to /usr/lib/squeak/SqueakPlugin.image. Take away or relocate the current SqueakPlugin.image in that location, if it happens to be present.

- If on an XO, replace the squeak-in-browser startup script /usr/lib/squeak/npsqueakrun with this custom script.

- Link the squeak plugin to your browsers plugin directory.
If you've downloaded and installed the plugin on a regular fedora machine, you don't have to do anything.
On the XO, link /usr/lib/squeak/npsqueakrun to the dir /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
On Ubuntu with Firefox 2, link /usr/lib/squeak/npsqueakrun to the dir /usr/lib/firefox/plugins
On Ubuntu with Firefox 3, link /usr/lib/squeak/npsqueakrun to the dir /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins
Other distributions, unknown, but should be somewhat the same as one of the previous.

And now of course restart your browser.

- Then surf to a page with the activity embedded in it.

If you need to embed an activity yourself, this is the code for it:

      <embed
		type="application/x-Squeak-Source"
		ALIGN="CENTER"
		src="test.001.pr"
		showSplash="false"
		flaps="none"
		base="example.org/"
		pluginspage="http://www.squeakland.org/plugin/detect/detectinstaller.html"
        width="100%"
        height="100%"> </embed>

As you might guess, this implies you've got a webserver running which can service http://example.org/test.001.pr

That's it!

Tips and tricks

Epaath is usually either in author mode or in user mode. If in user mode, the image can be unlocked by pressing ALT-SHIFT-w, selecting OLE, and then selecting author mode.

To go from author mode to user mode, just press left-click on the world, and select OLE -> usermode.

Open issues

Here's a short summary of the most acute problems the OLE Nepal people face at the moment while developing for the XO (now obsolete; this is as of 2008):

• Timer (it has been implemented but it doesn't work all the time, so it will be better if the timer function is generic)
  • sometimes we want a timer to halt all the operations in the image, and sometimes we want a timer that only halts a certain operation. Right now we have to use different functionality to implement our desired goal. What we want is a parameter to a generic timer function that switches between the two
  • the timer doesn't time in real time, and so if we want to have a shared activity to let two kids do things in a given time, they get out of sync, and so the one might have more time to do her task than the other.
• Text morph as a input control
• Localization of balloon text (tool tip)
• Sound Buffer problem
  • memory problem errors when a lot of sound files are played
• Optimization of Squeak activities on the XO the loading of projects. Better than it was, but still could use improvements.
• find a way to cleanly augment clean etoys image with epaati stuff
• in he Epaath main menu, make tooltip work with description of that particular activity. Prolly with the description in a text-file somewhere or something.

A lot of stuff that's on this page right now should be on the dev.laptop.org bug list together with some of the above items which are already there.