Scratch

We are working on a modified version of Scratch for the XO (the OLPC machine).

I've also bought an XO, and my son and I would love to have Scratch on it!

It may be a while before we get the laptop, as we ordered on almost the last day of the buy-two-get-one offer.

Ah, you lucky people, seems like you either have to live in North America or in Africa to be eligible to buy or receive an XO ;-) I believe Scratch would be a 'killer app' on the XO. I also imagine adapting Scratch to the XO requires adjusting the font and blocks sizes (as well as the various pointers) to the XO's high screen resolution, and modifying the file dialogs to Sugar's diary / activity metaphor. If they want to be able to also generate windows and mac distributions from the same code base a lot of changes will have to be applied to Scratch's current development image. It'll be interesting to see how the Scratch devolopers cope with these challanges, there could be some improvements coming out of this work for the other Scratch versions as well.

andresmh wrote:

Initial version of Scratch for the XO available on the OLPC website:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities#Programming

I was turned on to Scratch by one of the Level Designers at the office, and when I looked at the programming interface, I thought it looked familiar. It did, since I have been browsing through the included applications on the XO, while waiting for mine to arrive.

Lo and behold I read that the Turtle Art application is "...an activity with a Logo-inspired graphical "turtle" that draws colorful art based on Scratch-like snap-together visual programming elements."

I was excited to see how Turtle Art functioned, and now I have Scratch to play with. I shall be diving in with no regard for my safety.

Looking forward to being able to teach my son how to use Scratch to create applications and games, me on my laptop and him on his XO.

Mike Hovland
Senior Technical Artist
Midway Games
Chicago

Hi, Andre,

RE: Scratch. Thanks for the update about its availability for the XO. I'll download it tonite and we'll try it with kids next week.

Best,

Gary

jumpstart: yes, you do need the Java plugin for your browser in order to see projects on the web. I am not sure how easy it is to install the Java plugin for the browser that comes with the XO though. If you are able to install it please let us know. From what I know the browser is based on Mozilla Firefox so it shouldn't be impossible.

We've used scratch on the XO, and had it work ok.  There were still some obvious bugs (like (0,0) not being in the center of the stage), so I don't think the XO scratch is ready for prime-time yet.  I would appreciate hearing about when a new version is available.

I had no trouble installing Scratch (once I had done an update of the XO to a sufficiently recent build of the operating system, as the give-one-get-one laptops were released with too old a version).

I was not able to install Java in the time I had, as the one-laptop-per-child site does not provide an installer for it, and I couldn't get any of the java downloads on the Sun site to download completely with the "Browse" program.  If anyone does succeed in getting jave applets to work with the "Browse" program on the XO, I'd be interested in hearing how to do it.