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

Samuel Klein meta.sj at gmail.com
Tue Jul 24 02:32:19 EDT 2007


Squeak gives you a whole screen to draw on, and a different diversity
of projects.  It makes it particularly easy to draw your own objects
and then animate/program them.   It has a fun visual tutorial that
goes along with it, to get people started.
Fonts for some parts of programs are also still small :-)

Scratch runs on the laptops (you have to install it by hand from
http://www.tcpdpodcast.org/scratch.html at the moment). It is fun in
its own way, with a pretty regimented collection of commands and
constructs, and gives extra visual feedback on how different parts of
a program can snap together.  Right now the fonts are very small; it
needs to be sugarized.

TurtleArt is a current XO activity that is simpler than these two; you
are limited in what you can do, but it is shows how parts of a program
snap together, and your options tend to make dynamic, colorful
results.

SJ


On 7/23/07, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
> 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 -
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Games mailing list
> Games at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/games
>


More information about the Games mailing list