Concurrent programming by children
This event took place on Wednesday 05 October 2005 at 14:00
Dr. Ken Kahn London Knowledge Lab, United Kingdom
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.
This event took place on Wednesday 05 October 2005 at 14:00
Dr. Ken Kahn London Knowledge Lab, United Kingdom
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.
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Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...
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