[Etoys] Technical Report on OLPC Etoys

[Bert Freudenberg]

A new Technical Report has been posted to the VPRI website, titled  
"Etoys for One Laptop Per Child" by Scott Wallace, Yoshiki Ohshima,  
and Yours Truly:

http://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php

Abstract

We present an overview of the “OLPC Etoys” system, describe the  
intensive two-year development effort that produced the system, and  
discuss lessons learned. OLPC Etoys is an end-user authoring system  
for children, which was chosen to be distributed with the OLPC XO  
laptops at an early stage of the OLPC project.

Since we planned to derive OLPC Etoys by evolving an existing, mature  
system (“Squeakland”), it was expected to be a relatively  
straightforward undertaking. However, the OLPC XO platform’s special  
hardware characteristics, the evolution of the Sugar software stack,  
and the fundamentally international and multilingual nature of the  
project, all conspired to make the development effort challenging.

Over the two-year course of the project, we successfully kept up with  
the challenges, and delivered usable Etoys systems for every OLPC  
release. We steadily improved the UI, added a few high-leverage  
features, and fixed bugs, with a small and widely-distributed team and  
with help from the community.

- Bert -