[plt-scheme] kids, worlds and functional updates

Yaron Minsky wrote at 09/26/2009 02:44 PM:
> I'm playing around with the universe teachpack, and am curious whether 
> anyone has thoughts about how to make the coding of worlds reasonably 
> easy and intuitive for kids.

Kids?  HS-age, like what I believe PLT have worked with most so far, or 
are you talking, say, 5 year-olds?  If the latter... The PARC Smalltalk 
people were focused on young kids starting in the '70s (and a lot of our 
modern GUI is an accident of decisions that were originally made for 
kids), and contemporary morphs worlds are actually closer to the 
original PARC stuff than probably most people realize.  This PARC work 
was somewhat in parallel with the different work by Papert, et al. I 
suspect that a concentration of people interested in morphs worlds 
interfaces for kids are using Squeak right now.  I suggest that the 
fastest way to bootstrap is to see what Squeak people know.  That might 
give you the current thinking on your immediate question.  (I'm not 
up-to-date in this area myself, I should add.)

-- 
http://www.neilvandyke.org/