1. 1 April 8, 1998Marat Boshernitsan In the beginning there was LOGO... A dialect of Lisp, developed in 1960 by Daniel Bobrow, Wallace Feurzeig and Seymour Papert. Interactive and interpreted: bugs made obvious Take the best ideas in contemporary language design and “child-engineer” them. Programming isn’t the point: how can computers help kids learn? –The computer is being used to program the child, or... –The child programs the computer?

2. 2 April 8, 1998Marat Boshernitsan KidSim: End User Programming of Simulations Four traditions in computer programming: –Production systems –Graphical rewrite rules –Programming by demonstration –Simulations Children create worlds containing characters: –Behaviors defined by a list of rules –A character can have variety of appearances –Characters possess user-defined properties –Characters are instantiated from character classes

3. 3 April 8, 1998Marat Boshernitsan KidSim: End User Programming of Simulations Programming by Demonstration + Direct Manipulation = Programming Made Easy? Programming by Demonstration: abstract the example to introduce generality -- hard! Are graphical rewrite rules expressive enough? What is the educational value of programming simulations?

4. 4 April 8, 1998Marat Boshernitsan ToonTalk: An Animated Programming Environment for Children Take the best ideas in contemporary language design and “child-engineer” them, again. General purpose concurrent programming system Goals: self-teaching and powerful. Animate the source code: programming environment is a video game. Every abstract computational aspect is mapped onto a concrete metaphor.

5. 5 April 8, 1998Marat Boshernitsan ToonTalk: An Animated Programming Environment for Children Computation Agent Methods Method preconditions Method actions Tuples Comparison tests Agent spawning Agent termination Constants Channel transmit capabilities Channel receive capabilities Program Storage City House Robots (with though bubbles) Contents of though bubble Actions taught to robot Cubbies Scales Loaded trucks Bombs Number pads, text pads, etc. Birds Nests Notebooks 

6. 6 April 8, 1998Marat Boshernitsan Drawing on Napkins, Video-Game Animation, and other ways to Program Computers ToonTalk: beyond the programming language: Logo - turtle graphics, ToonTalk - video-game programming. Video-games are fun: it’s fun to train robots, use magic wands, give birds things, etc. Is ToonTalk more than a fancy syntax? Navigate source code? Forget it! Hierarchical storage for kids? Still limited by the size of the screen...