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Concurrent programming by children
for exploring mathematics, building scientific models, and making computer games
Dr. Ken Kahn
This event took place on 5th October 2005 at 2:00pm (13:00 GMT)
Knowledge Media Institute, Berrill Building, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, MK7 6AA
Many have extolled the benefits of learning by building and exploring computational models. But typically computer programming requires a mastery of complex computational abstractions. The research we'll be presenting describes a way to replace these abstractions with playful, animated, game-like, virtual objects without sacrificing expressive power. We'll present via live demos three systems that have explored this idea. ToonTalk (www.toontalk.com) is a general-purpose concurrent programming language that presents program building blocks in terms of familiar objects. A ToonTalk programmer trains robots to manipulate boxes containing numbers, text, pictures, sounds, birds, trucks, robots, and other boxes. Birds are the means that program fragments coordinate and communicate. Trucks are used to spawn new sub-computations. The Playground Project (www.ioe.ac.uk/playground) provided tools to children 6 to 8 years old enabling them to make their own computer games. Playground built upon ToonTalk. It provided the children with transparent components and behaviours that could be assembled or broken down into for modification and reassembly. The WebLabs Project (www.weblabs.eu.com) is providing children 10 to 14 years old with components and learning materials to explore science by building computational models and mathematics by building ToonTalk programs. Children publish their reports which typically include runnable models or programs on the project web site. Other children across Europe read and post public comments on these reports.
ToonTalk was designed and built by Ken Kahn who, after earning a doctorate in computer science from MIT, has spent 30 years as a researcher in programming languages, computer animation, and programming systems for children. He has been a faculty member at MIT, University of Stockholm, and Uppsala University. For over eight years he was a researcher at Xerox PARC. In 1992, Ken founded Animated Programs whose mission is to make computer programming child's play. He has participated in two large-scale European research projects that have built upon ToonTalk. |
The webcast was open to 100 users
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 Click below to play the event (103 minutes) |
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