ToonTalk - Turning Concurrent Programming into Child's Play
Ken Kahn*
University of London
We have constructed a general-purpose concurrent programming system,
ToonTalk, in which the source code is animated and the programming
environment is a video game. Every abstract computational aspect is
mapped into a concrete metaphor. For example, a computation is a city,
a concurrent object is a house, birds carry messages between houses, a
method or clause is a robot trained by the user. The computational
model underlying ToonTalk is based upon concurrent constraint
programming. The programmer controls a "programmer persona" in this
animated world to construct, run, debug and modify programs. We believe
that ToonTalk is especially well suited for giving children the
opportunity to build real programs in a manner that is easy to learn and
fun to do. See http://www.toontalk.com for more information.
Children's uses of ToonTalk to build games, scientific simulations, and
to explore mathematics will be discussed as well. A live demo of
ToonTalk will be given.
*
