Brian Silverman showed us a project called Turtle Art that he is developing. It's a "simple programming" environment for kids. Silverman contrasted simple programming and simple programs. The user starts with a turtle in a blank gray field and has a collection of graphical programming building block that can be snapped together to control the turtle's path and the kinds of colored trails the turtle can leave. Each graphical "command" has sockets where are other commands can fit, usually one socket for the previous action and one socket for the next one. Control structures are also building blocks, so for instance, "repeat" has a socket for the previous action, a socket for the command to be repeated and a socket for the action to continue to after the repetition is done.
Silverman showed that unpredictable behavior is possible even with this limited set of primitives by changing some parameters for some intrinsically defined curves with unpredicatble overall behavior.
He ended his talk with a call for long-term "project-based" learning for children, saying that there is a trend to have shorter and shorter term assignments, and that he thinks that many of the long term projects that adults find interesting would also be interesting for children.
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