Etoys
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.
- OLPC-Squeak-latest.zip contains dev image+changes (use this for developing changesets)
- OLPCPlugin-latest.zip contains only the image, and preferences are set for deployment (this one is for building projects)
Remember to update your image!
- etoys-image-and-pr.zip is a zip of the very latest image and projects in the git tree
Activity Source: http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/etoys
git clone git://dev.laptop.org/projects/etoys
There is a mirror of the latest git tree at http://etoys.laptop.org/src
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 the Sugar emulator, use sugar-jhbuild:
./sugar-jhbuild buildone squeak ./sugar-jhbuild buildone etoys
Etoys are built by default in the latest sugar-jhbuild.
Bugs: Please submit tickets at http://dev.laptop.org/, select the "Etoys" component.
Discussions
Feel free to edit below.
Programming for the OLPC using Squeak
We are beginning a tutorials serie about programming using the OLPC Squeak. Not for kids, but for programers trying to create activities inside the Etoys environment. We have also a customized kit for the installation of a Windows version of the simulator having Fedora+Sugar+Etoys. One click only... read how to use it at the tutorials.
Unfortunatelly, now only in brazilian portuguese. The link is here. The pages are in the format to be accessed, in the future, by the OLPC browser.