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
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