Etoys, Alice and tile programming

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Fri May 9 13:25:09 UTC 2003


This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw in the 
CDROM "Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the set). This 
project was basically about being able to march around a football 
field and the multiple marchers were controlled by a very simple tile 
based programming system. Also, a grad student from a number of years 
ago, Mike Travers, did a really excellent thesis at MIT about enduser 
programming of autonomous agents -- the system was called AGAR -- and 
many of these ideas were used in the Vivarium project at Apple 15 
years ago. The thesis version of AGAR used DnD tiles to make programs 
in Mike's very powerful system.

The etoys originated as a design I did to make a nice constructive 
environment for the internet -- the Disney Family.com site -- in 
which small projects could make by parents and kids working together. 
SqC made the etoys ideas work, and Kim Rose and teacher BJ Conn 
decided to see how they would work in a classroom. I thought the 
etoys lacked too many features to be really good in a classroom, but 
I was wrong. The small number of features and the ease of use turned 
out to be real virtues.

We've been friends with Randy Pausch for a long time and have had a 
number of outstanding interns from his group at CMU over the years. 
For example, Jeff Pierce (now a prof at GaTech) did SqueakAlice 
working with Andreas Raab to tie it to Andreas' Balloon3D. Randy's 
group got interested in the etoys tile scripting and did a very nice 
variant (it's rather different from etoys, and maybe better).

Cheers,

Alan

At 8:57 PM -0300 5/8/03, ajbn at cin.ufpe.br wrote:
>Folks,
>
>I have been trying the new version of Alice <www.alice.org>. It also uses
>tile programming like Etoys.Just for curiosity, does anyone know the 
>history of Tile Programming?
>TIA,
>
>Antonio Barros
>PhD Student
>Informatics Center
>Federal University of Pernambuco
>Brazil


-- 



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list