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Have a look at Squeak.
It's a Smalltalk virtual machine with easily programmable 2D and 3D graphics, audio support, runs on just about anything.

Squeak
Squeakland

Try Squeakland From their site:

Squeakland is here to offer a variety of fun and wonderful experiences to people who use their computers to create. Squeak can be used by people of all ages. Squeakland is meant to be a playground for developing a community of people who want to work together to invent new media types.

(who modded up the stupid "slashdot.org" posts so people don't see relevant ones from ACs?)

A buddy of mine turned me on to http://www.squeakland.org. Squeak provides an object oriented environment that's drag and drop, and fun to play with. Think of it like Oracle Forms, Power Builder, or VB for kids. There are published squeak projects that are fun to play with. At the same time, kids can make their own. I'm just getting my feet wet, but I expect to get my daugher (7) using it soon. And it's supported under Linux, Unix, Mac, and other, less useful, operating systems.

Squeak is great on multiple levels:

• It's Smalltalk, a true OO language (unlike Perl, Python, Java, C++ etc).
• It's multimedia out of the box
• It's truly cross-platform (same bit-for-bit image can run on 10 different platforms)
• It's muckable (entire source code of OS down to the VM can be patched in a running system, and even the VM can be patched and simulated and rebuilt)
• It's internet ready (built in email, news, irc, web clients, and web server)
• It has multiple levels of programming (tiles, smalltalk, C/C++)
• It has a large user community, including support from the people who originated Smalltalk in 1972
• It's free!

I think the site is a Wiki. Probably a Swiki actually. Notice the 'edit' button at the top of the page. Save is password protected. I guess somebody guessed/hacked the password.

I didn't find anything on the downloads page. Disappointing. This could be interesting. Squeak itself seems like fun. I've tinkered a little but I don't know enough Smalltalk to have done anything useful yet. There's a Squeak browser plugin available from Squeakland and lots of Squeak goodness at Squeak, including ports of the virtual machine to most platforms and lots of docs and tutorials.

An interesting alternative to Java if you have a yen to write cross platform code that runs in a lumbering, slow, resource hogging virtual machine. And it has the little mouse thing. I like the little mouse thing.

I've seen some virtual worlds done in Alan Kay's Squeak that are more or less what the original poster described. Because Squeak is done in SmallTalk, you can use late binding to add properties at run time anywhere in the class hierarchy. Also, because Squeak is done in SmallTalk, it's kind slow so I can't imagine doing a fully functional virtual world in it...

Other points:-

• Knoppix to take home. Can't overwrite the parents' precious files!
• Don't waste time installing. Just dd the file set to the students' disks beforehand.
• Have the same distro on all student machines.
• Be very familiar with the distro youself.
• Introduce a scripting language.
  • Ruby for the older students. FOX or Tk windows available.
  • Squeak Smalltalk for the younger ones.
• Be very visual. Kids need to see things quickly.
• Games, and more Games. It's supposed to fun.

The e-toys are great fun for school age children. Squeak for the cognoscenti, and Squeakland for Mum, Dad, and the Kids. Heaps of fun. Good books available from Amazon too.

Interesting, the last time I had looked at Alice it was still at Virginia Tech.

There is a free (as in speech) version of Alice in Squeak Smalltalk which runs not only in Linux, but also Windows, Macs, PDAs and so on.

The above site seems to be having some problems, so check SqueakLand instead.

http://www.squeak.org/"

From their web site: "With the Squeak programming system, we have made some delightful and powerful educational applets. If you are a student, parent, or teacher, please jump over to www.squeakland.org, and download some great educational projects."

Stephan

You could do worse than look at what Alan Kay is involved with. Kay is a true computer pioneer and has from the beginning focussed on children as users of computers. His goal is to empower them by giving them new kinds of tools that let them create, not locking them into predefined worlds.

His current project is Squeak, which is designed to let kids create dynamic documents, games and worlds and interact with them.

Teaching kids to use technology as creators rather than as passive consumers would be one of the most important lessons you could present.

Dolphin Smalltalk has a plugin as well. However, like Dolphin Smalltalk itself, it is Win32 only.

One of the bigger, more business oriented Smalltalks, VisualWorks, also has a plugin. It looks like it too is Win32 only, but VisualWorks itself is cross-platform, and runs on Windows, Mac OS, and a big number of Unices.

The coolest plug-in for a language I've ever seen has got to be Oberon's Juice, by far. Unlike the Java and Squeak VM plug-ins, which take bytecode for their respective VMs, the Juice plugin takes pre-parsed Oberon code and compiles and executes it on the fly. This makes for really fast applets. I tried it a while back and it took a heckuva lot less time for Juice to download, compile, and execute the applet than it took for a comparitive Java applet to start up. Really cool stuff. However, it seems it's not been maintained in a while, and is Windows and Mac only. Seeing how Oberon itself has source available (IIRC), I'm sure that some Oberon enthusiast who wanted to get a generized Unix version going of Juice could do so.

First, the reply to this comment: "OOP is important, but it is not something you can grok as a beginning programmer, IMHO."

IMNSHO, this is not true. Check out http://www.squeakland.org/learn/elementary.html. Those projects on the page were created by 4th and 5th graders in a Smalltalk-derived environment. (Admittedly, I was programming in BASIC in the 4th grade -- 1981 -- and assembly by 6th, but this is still impressive given that the entire class seems to grok it -- definitely not the case when I was a kid.) Click around and you'll see that things progress from there, but the point is that people inherently think in objects. This is pointed out by many psychology texts.

It is also a fact, however, that humans are creatures of habit (for the most part). The reason so many programmers have a difficult time picking up OO concepts is that they have trained themselves to think like the machines rather than making the machines do the translation. In my experience, with a few notable exceptions, beginning programmers find OO easier to learn because the habits of procedural thinking aren't as solidified in their psyches.

Now, as for what languages I would use when.... I would start with Smalltalk (or some similar, solidly OO language like Self) for those who have no programming knowledge and for those who don't yet know or care that computers "talk to themselves" in binary. Then, using that language progress to learning about how computers work internally (binary, CPU vs RAM vs ROM, etc.). Somewhere in there, start to teach C or Pascal. Introduce LISP and possibly Modula after that. From that point... I don't think it matters any longer. By this point, you're likely at least to the college level, so let the student decide which languages to learn from that point or teach the language(s) of the moment, Java, C#, C++, Object-COBOL, whatever. ;-)

The interesting thing about that order is that I don't think it matters at what age you start. Progression should be made at the rate the student really groks the subject at hand.

That's my two bits, anyway.

Squeak is based around a very portable and graphical Smalltalk environment. Squeak is GPL'd and available for a wide variety of platforms including MAC, Windows, and Linux.

Here's a quote about Squeak stolen from the squeakland.org web site:

Squeak Is An Idea Processor For Children Of All Ages! ... an instrument whose music is ideas ... We all know what a word processor is, but what is an idea processor? Of course, we can play with some ideas and express them in a word processor, but a lot of important ideas need more, for example: art, music, math and science. And some of these ideas really need a "dynamic medium for creative thought": music, animation, and many areas of science. Squeak aims to have "no threshold", in that many five year olds can explore ideas in it; and "no ceiling": its range includes all of the things that can be done with computers. When five year olds learn English, they are starting to learn the language of Shakespeare and Feynman. Their journey through the next decade will enrich their vocabulary, ideas about people and the world, and give them stronger ways to structure ideas in language. In a similar fashion, the language learned by the five year olds to do simple projects in Squeak is also the language used by the experts to make 3D graphics engines and get things to happen on the Internet. All the projects done in Squeak are directly transmittable to others over the Internet. Users can chat (by text or voice), send and receive email, exchange objects by dragging and dropping, and multiple users can share a project to interact in real time. Each time a project is created there is an opportunity to set up a new interest group that can provide mutual assitance and kudos.

Here are some links about using Squeak in education.