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, presentations, 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

Mailing list

There is a mailinglist specifically discussing Etoys in the OLPC environment: etoys(at)laptop.org. Please subscribe to keep in touch!

For Etoys designers

To build etoys, the best thing would be to use the actual OLPC image. However, etoys authored using the squeakland.org version should be fairly compatible. Remember that the actual screen of the kids machines will be very small, even though it has a 1200x900 resolution!

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.

Images can be downloaded at http://tinlizzie.org/olpc, though "Tin Lizzie" is a different project. Remember to update your image!

Source: http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/etoys

RPMs: The Squeak VM and Etoys activity are packaged as RPMs. The easiest to get them is with yum:

wget http://etoys.laptop.org/olpc-etoys.repo
cp olpc-etoys.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
yum install etoys

To stay up-to-date, just do

yum update etoys squeak-vm

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

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

If these modules are unknown, run

git pull

inside the sugar-jhbuild directory.

Bugs: Please submit tickets at http://dev.laptop.org/, select the "Etoys" component.

Discussions

Feel free to edit below.