Etoys

Etoys running on the OLPC display

Squeak Etoys was inspired by LOGO, PARC-Smalltalk, Hypercard, and starLOGO. It is a media-rich authoring environment with a simple powerful scripted object model for many kinds of objects created by end-users that runs on many platforms, and is free and open source. It includes 2D and 3D graphics, images, text, particles, pres-entations, web-pages, videos, sound and MIDI, etc. It includes the ability to share desktops with other Etoy users in real-time, so many forms of immersive mentoring and play can be done over the Internet. It is multilingual, runs on more than 20 platforms bit-identically, and has been successfully used in USA, Europe, South America (Brazil, Colombia, Argentina), Asia (Japan, Korea, India, Nepal), and elsewhere.

Further reading: http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/essays.html

For Etoys designers

We are planning a contest for the best etoys designed to work on the OLPC machines. The winners will be included in the repository distributed with 5 million machines next year. Precise criteria and the format for submissions are being worked on; but a good entry should be fun, suitable for younger kids (text shouldn't be too complex), hackable (code should be elegant), compact (disk space is precious), and should illustrate some creative aspects of using Etoys. Of course the best examples might be existing etoys rewritten to work nicely on the laptops.

Come back to this page in a few days for more information...

For Developers

The current Etoys version for OLPC is based on the squeakland.org image. It runs on the latest Squeak VM with minimal Sugar glue code.

There is a mailinglist: (to be created soon? for now, you may use the content mailing list).

You can find downloads on tinlizzie.org, and remember to update your image!

Sugar: For running inside Sugar, use sugar-jhbuild:

./sugar-jhbuild buildone squeak
./sugar-jhbuild buildone etoys

If these modules are unknown, run

git pull

which applies this patch: sugar-jhbuild-etoys.diff

Discussions

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