Concept
Etoys is a child-friendly computer environment and object-oriented prototype-based programming language for use in education. Etoys is a media-rich authoring environment with a scripted object model for many different objects that runs on different platforms and is free and open source. Squeak was originally developed at Apple in 1996 by Dan Ingalls. Squeak is a Smalltalk implementation, object-oriented, class-based, and reflective, derived from Smalltalk-80 at Apple Computer. It was developed by some of the original Smalltalk-80 developers, including Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, and Alan Kay. The team also included Scott Wallace and John Maloney. Squeak 4.0 is released under the MIT License, with some of the original Apple parts remaining under the Apache License. Contributions are required to be under MIT. “Back to the Future: the story of Squeak, a practical Smalltalk written in itself” by Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, Scott Wallace, Alan Kay. Paper presented at OOPSLA, Atlanta, Georgia, 1997 by Dan Ingalls. Squeak migrated to Disney Imagineering Research in 1996. Etoys development began and was directed by Alan Kay at Disney to support constructionist learning, influenced by Seymour Papert and the Logo programming language. The original Etoys development team at Disney included: Scott Wallace, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, Dan Ingalls. Etoys influenced the development of another Squeak-based educational programming environment known as Scratch. Scratch was developed at MIT, after Mitchell Resnick invited John Maloney of the original Etoys development team to come to MIT. Etoys migrated to Viewpoints Research, Inc., incorporated in 2001, to improve education for the world’s children and advance the state of systems research and personal computing. In 2006-2007, Etoys built in Squeak was used by the OLPC project, on their OLPC XO-1 educational machine. It is preinstalled on all of the XO-1 laptops. “Etoys for One Laptop Per Child”, paper by Bert Freudenberg, Yoshiki Ohshima, Scott Wallace, January 2009.