Out of the box we've disabled halos and the world menu, but you can enable them by hitting Alt-k for a Workspace and then evaluating OLE authorMode.
It takes about two hours to teach a (non-Smalltalk) programmer to design and script Squeak/Etoys activities like the ones we've built. The skills are passed on very easily by way of face-to-face demonstration but they're difficult to pick up all by yourself. We must discover or produce more effective materials for people to teach themselves Etoys - please point us to anything that you have found especially helpful!
Make some videos on Etoy scripting
For now we're programmers borrowing all icons from Gcompris or images.google.com