

Slime Attack on Scratch

a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

[etoys 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.

a "media authoring tool"-- software that you can download to your computer and then use to create your own media or share and play with others.

Another week, and another piece of One Laptop Per Child software aiming to turn kids into programming maestros before the distractions of puberty. After four years research, a subset of MIT's seemingly limitless supply of boffin filled cubicles, the rather wonderfully named " Life Long Kindergarten " unleashed "Scratch" upon the world. In a BBC news article that coincided with its official release , their reporter, Jonathan Fildes, closed his article with a reference to a version being developed for the OLPC XO. According to the developers, Scratch is:Scratch is written in Squeak , an open source implementation of the smalltalk language, and if you've been following the OLPC project for a while, you'll probably have come across the name before, usually in conjunction with etoys. The OLPC wiki says of, etoys And what, might you ask, is Squeak? According to Squeakland , the home of all things related to Squeak and education, it is:So, are all these things the same?

Well, not exactly. The best explanation I've uncovered came in an email last month to the Squeakland mailing list. In response to a query bout the suitability of etoys for a group of school children with learning disabilities, Eric Eisaman, a physics teacher who has been using Squeak etoys for a few years, pointed out that different classes respond differently to Scratch and etoys and appears to suggest that Scratch is a good introduction to etoys, which is a good introduction to squeak:

[...] "Scratch" is a gentler approach to programming than Etoys yet lacks some of the advanced functionality. [...] The more advanced students have shown some success in creating with the latest Full Squeak image without using Etoys. [...] I think it's important for the students to see growing levels of sophistication built on the same basic virtual machine going from Scratch to Etoys to Squeak to Smalltalk.



Squeak on OLPC XO

This neatly mirrors the XO's construtivist philosophy of children learning different tools that themselves can be broken down for further inspection and scrutiny. Squeak is the underlying language beneath both etoys and Scratch. Both Etoys and Squeak will be pre-loaded on XOs when they are released, but whether or not Scratch is included will no doubt depend on the ironing out of a few kinks, such as a current inability to run fully functional in Linux.

Although the response to these tools has been very positive, just have a look at the number of diggs the story received when it hit the front page on Tuesday, there are a couple of vaguely worried noises emerging. Although the tools being developed - etoys and Scratch - are without doubt well thought out and expertly implemented, two questions emerge - Why are these tools almost exclusively "game" orientated and are the developers focusing on the tools themselves as opposed to the ability to actually learn tools.

The first question is posed by _why, a ruby developer who has put together a package called HacketyHack which teaches kids to program useful applications with simple coding and the second mirrors a recent concern shown by Mark Shuttleworth of his Shuttleworth Foundation's efforts to develop a meaningful curriculum for young learners.

Whether such concerns are justified with regards to this specific piece of software - _why recently commented that Scratch is a positive step for Squeak - they appear to remain for the wider OLPC project.