What Is Scratch, Squeak & eToys?

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Scratch is a simple-to-learn programming software, created by Mitchel Resnick and the team at the MIT Media Lab. Based on the idea of a disc jockey mixing (scratching) music, Scratch allows you to create interactive activities by simply snapping together programmable blocks on the screen. By snapping together coded blocks of directions, you create a script that tells your sprite (character) how to act in your interactive story, game, or animation.

Scratch has been developed to encourage students to ‘Imagine, Program and Share’. A supporting Scratch website has been established that allows students to share their Scratch projects with the rest of the world and also learn from other peoples’ projects. The Scratch online community also includes a forum where Scratch users can share their ideas and get support.

Mitchel Resnick (2007) describes a common opinion of the web as “…primarily a place for browsing, clicking, and chatting.” However, Scratch allows students to become media producers rather than simply media consumers, by creating their own interactive stories, games, and animations and then sharing them with the rest of the world (Resnick, 2007).

Scratch is FREE to download and can be accessed at http://scratch.mit.edu/ 

 

 

 

To get started with Scratch, check out this great step-by-step guide to making your first project: http://scratch.wik.is/@api/deki/files/567/=ScratchGettingStartedv13.pdf

Squeak is an easy to learn software development environment. Created by computer scientist Alan Kay, and his research team at Apple Computers in 1996. Based on the Apple Smalltalk-80 Language, it was originally intended to be a quick and visual way of prototyping applications. Smalltalk is a simple to learn object based language; powerful and flexible, yet ‘safe’ for non-programmers and learners. (Some programming languages are complicated and “dangerous” and not suitable for inexperienced computer learners).

The interface is a ‘sandbox’ or completely free flexible environment where objects can be written, modified, scripted and made interactive. Squeak aims to have a ‘high ceiling’ and be adaptable for teaching abstract or difficult to represent concepts. It is based around reuse and exploration of objects.

Bill Kerr, a South Australian Educator mentions in a talk on Alan Kay, http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/alanKay+talk

Jerome Bruner (1960s) identified three mentalities: enactive (kinaesthetic), iconic and symbolic (abstraction). The idea is that repeated doing of visual manipulations will gradually lead to the students developing abstract ideas."
Alan Kay took this idea, and phrased this as “Doing with Images Makes Symbols”, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-533537336174204822, referring to images in the world representing and modelling the internal cogitative symbols of the mind.

The software was designed to be cross platform and would run on a number of platforms.
Using a ‘virtual machine’, squeak has been ported to many platforms including Windows, OSX, Linux and embedded systems such as mobile phones.

As development of squeak progressed, research went into using the squeak language to create rich learning activities.

Google Video, “Alan Kay: What is Squeak?”
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6605997857319097923

Squeak is comprised on a Virtual Machine, called the Squeak VM, and squeak activities – Sets of objects and scripts.

The SqueakVM must be installed on the PC before the activities can be used.
It can be downloaded from: http://www.squeak.org/Download

Alternately, Squeak can be installed as part of the OLPC environment (see below).

The book, http://www.squeakbyexample.org/ available in both printed and electronic form is highly regarded and full of great online and offline activities on using Squeak in the classroom.

Etoys is a child focused programming sandbox and play/learning environment. The underlying programming of Etoys is Squeak. The software was created under the guidance of Squeak creator Alan Kay and influenced by the work of mathematician Seymour Papert and his learning/playing environment Logo.

Paperts’ learning theory of Constructionism forms a basis for many recent and computer learning environments – Lego Logo, Mindstorms and Scratch are all directly influenced by MIT computer scientists, mathematicians and educators. Constructionism is the theory that learners actively construct their own mental model of the world around them and this is learning is most effective when learners are creating, modelling and manipulating objects in the world. Software objects, such as those objects used in the Etoys environment allow the learner to play with hypothetical, abstract or impossible.

Etoys can be seen as a child friendly squeak environment that facilitates constructionist learning.

In http://www.laptop.org/OLPCEtoys.pdf, Alan Kay states:

Etoys is:
“Like Logo” – but with costumes, multimedia, etc.
“Like Starlogo” – but at all levels of scale
“Like Hypercard and Powerpoint” – but simpler and richer
“Like Smalltalk” – it is Squeak Smalltalk underneath
“Like itself” – it has special properties that are unique

The OLPC Project, or one laptop per child, is a MIT Media Labs project set up to provide the poorest children in developing nations have access to cheap, connected computers, It uses the free and open source operating system Linux and contains many open source and free educational tools.

The project has accelerated the development of many open source educational tools, and EToys and Squeak, both from MIT, have in turn heavily influenced the laptop project.

The Etoys, and online published projects form a basis for many of the activities on the OLPC environment. EToys is based on the squeak virtual machine; It uses the same Smalltalk-80 language that squeak uses and so has the same advantages such as cross-platform, portability and reuse.

The Etoys environment can be downloaded from http://www.squeakland.org/download/

It has been in development since 1996 but most of the work in the last few years has gone into adapting this environment for the OLPC laptop. Many of the latest online EToy activities are designed to run on an OLPC and take screen size, laptop inputs and multilingual keyboards into consideration.

The easiest way to provide teachers and students access to the OLPC and Etoys environment is via the actual XO OLPC laptop. Over 1 million OLPC laptops have been produced and distributed to children in the world. However, very few laptops have made it to Australia.

An Alternative to using the OLPC laptop hardware is via emulation or ‘booting’ of the OLPC environment on a regular PC.

Copies of the OLPC hard disk can be downloaded from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_USB_disks, and this can be connected to an emulation tool such as Parallels or VMWare on Apple OSX, or VMware, VirtualBox or Qemu. Alternatively the hard disk copy can be written to a USB stick and used to start up the PC.

One advantage of using a USB stick with the OLPC hard disk image is that every student can have their own physical copy of the environment that will work on any number of computers. Students have complete control of their own private portable computer environment.

An internet connected OLPC has access to thousands of online activities created by students and teachers;  http://squeakland.org/ and http://wiki.laptop.org are used for collaboration and sharing.

References

Resnick, M. (2007). Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society, Learning and Leading with Technology, December/January 2007-08, pp 18- 22
Accessed at http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/Learning-Leading-final.pdf, 3 October 2008