Squeak Etoys: Interactive and Collaborative Learning Environments

Introduction

Squeak Etoys is a free and open source media-rich authoring system with a user-friendly visual interface which comes preinstalled on One Laptop Per Child XO computers. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project¹ is a revolutionary blueprint for children’s personal computer use created to bring an efficient and functional educational technological tool to nearly every child between six and twelve years old, throughout the world. The OLPC initiative is especially important to students in developing countries due to the fact that “most of the nearly two billion children in the developing world are inadequately educated or receive no education at all. One in three does not complete the fifth grade.”²

Founded in 2005, One Laptop Per Child Foundation³ is a non-profit organization which brings forward innovative ideas on the use of personal computers by children and promotes widespread realization and assimilation of computer technologies. The goal of the OLPC Foundation is to create novel educational opportunities for the world’s children by providing each child in developing countries with a book-size, light and portable computer for personal use at school and at home. As the outcome of the OLPC program, the XO laptop is a low-cost, low power, Internet ready, multifunctional laptop computer. It is equipped with built-in speakers and microphone, video and still camera, and comes with preinstalled open source Linux operating system and free software for various activities: such as, reading, writing, drawing, painting, recording, music editing, web browsing, and basic computer programming. In case of limited availability of electrical energy, an XO laptop can be charged with alternate power sources. The XO laptop is safe to carry in a backpack and has sturdy hardware design with a waterproof keyboard. XO can withstand heat, humidity, and accidents that are ordinary in everyday lives of children; moreover, the computer has five-year life expectancy. In addition to a built-in standard WiFi capability, every XO computer can function as a wireless router creating a decentralized, self-configuring mesh network of interconnected computers within range. It allows children to collaborate and share activities in the classroom, and interact and communicate with classmates from home. As OLPC is an ongoing project, the XO-2, an improved model with less power consumption, is planned for production in 2010.⁴

The OLPC project was initiated by Nicholas Negroponte, professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; it quickly expanded to include a wide range of dedicated people from academia, industry, and the open source community. Due to their efforts according to The New York Times, nearly 600,000 XO laptops have been ordered since 2007 to be distributed to children in more then 30 developing countries (Lohr, 2008).

The idea of an affordable notebook computer specifically designed for children’s use was long thought to be an unlikely scenario. Four decades ago at the early days of computer technology most computing machines were the size of a room and almost no one would dream that they would ever be suitable for children to use. However, the adaptation of the Logo programming language⁵ for children in Seymour Papert’s experimental work at MIT demonstrated the educational potential of the constructivist ideas and computers in children’s education (Brand, 1987; Negroponte, 1995).