[OLPC-Games] Status of MIT's Scratch?

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Jul 23, 2007, at 19:12 , Clare Richardson wrote:
> I was wondering what the timeline is for MIT’s Scratch on the  
> laptop.  I’ve heard it will happen, and that their Linux version is  
> due out this year.
>
> We were planning on teaching Python/Pygame to high school girls to  
> develop games for the laptop, but we’ve had some concerns about our  
> short time crunch (we only see them for 90 min per week, and a  
> total of about 40 hours).  Scratch has been suggested as an  
> alternative to us and some of the sample projects I’ve seen look  
> pretty good, but we definitely want to keep OLPC as a motivating  
> component of our program.
As far as I know, Scratch will not be adapted to the OLPC in the near  
future. Yes the Linux version would work, but when I last spoke to  
the Scratch developers they thought the UI would have to be changed  
considerably for the small screen.

You might look at Squeak/Etoys as an alternative to Scratch (which is  
built on Squeak, too), which is available on the OLPC, now. Games  
have been built with it by kids from elementary school to university  
students. For example, here is an instruction poster for a "Lunar  
Lander Game":

	http://squeakland.org/pdf/poster/landerbooklet.pdf

To learn more about Squeak, go to

	http://squeakland.org/

For Etoys on OLPC see

	http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Etoys

- Bert -