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like Stagecast Creator.

i truly appreciate that people are out there are researching radical new ideas on GUI design, and are willing to think outside the box. my hat off to Mr. Raskin for that. i have no problem with him telling me what i should do, either, because an oversized ego is often necessary to change the status quo.

that said, i also think Raskin is totally off with his direction, just like many others. i wrote my thesis on GUI design - visual programming, so be exact and then went on to work with the best approach i found in this regard.

for the thesis, i had the (somewhat tedious) task to look at all other research in this area. what i found was surprisingly bad - there usually was some theory / psychological approach / philosophy, which sounded pretty reasonable. and then there was the implementation (if there was one at all), which was almost always just awful.

raskin fits in there pretty well: just take a look at the website! it reminds me of man-pages. i consider myself an expert user of man pages (and unix and vi and all that) but man pages are NOT a good way to present information. lots of scrolling and find-commands are not an efficient way to navigate information. to the contrary.
well, ok, i thought, maybe they slipped on the web page. so i checked the flash demo. i read the intro, which contains sentences like "check the little specks, they hide images and all kinds of cool stuff". ahm. ok?! i am sorry but i don't buy this for one second.
in the meantime, the desktop interfaces are evolving. latest lovely feature i found in OS X is the search field in every Finder window, which allows you to instantly search the current selected directory. i use it almost every day now. instant search results and content search are immediately useful additions.

i am betting that i can set up my desktop to do anything i want to do quicker and with less thinking than any command line interface. my apps are in the dock, 1/10th of a second to start. they all have "recent files" lists. most of the time, i never quit them. the computer is on instantly from sleep. if i use an app that is not in the dock, i hit cmd-shift-A in the finder... it's all very, very efficient.

Stagecast Creator.

• Stagecast www.stagecast.com
• ToonTalk
• 3d GameMaker
• Lego Mindstorms
• Flash

What I think would be good is to make use of one of the simulation environments around like eToys or Stagecast. Something where you focus on making stuff - not typing endless boilerplate.

Programming as a skill for its own sake isn't worth teaching in highschool. Its not even a marketable skill in the US anymore.

I completely agree - kids are insanely creative. Here is a little story: We were developing a product at Apple [i was an intern at the time] which would later turn into Stagecast, a visual programming language for Kids. You can create characters and give them simple rules with this program.

We were at a school doing a user-test. One of the researchers gave a 5 minute introduction to the software - how to use it. I timed it: It was _exactly_ 5 minutes. The the kids, ages 8 - 9, would have a go at it. What they produced was just unbelievable in terms of variety, detail, and... creativity. We had lemmings jumping off cliffs and dying a bloody death, we had roses flowering, we had characters running around on the screen, we had a full-fleged traffic simulation complete with traffic jam... Each of those children did something completely different from the next. Not knowing what to do was not a problem any of them experienced. At the end of the lesson we had to pry them away from the computers.

So if kids are insanely creative - then to not be creative when they are adults must be something they get taught by society.

Yeah, how about a programming system actually designed for kids?

It's now cross platform (java), and available from Stagecast
Looks like it gives a great intro to OO programming, since every character is an object to which you can assign properties and behaviors.

Stagecast Creator was originally Cocoa by Apple (no, not Cocoa, Cocoa), a programming tool for kids. They learned by writing games. Stagecast ported it to Java. Anyway, some friends have had their kids learn programming with Cocoa, and it seems to have been very easy for them.

Ah, here's a better explanation (thanks, Google), with a focus on game writing.

Stagecast Creator is a fairly elementary language that can introduce the young ones to object oriented thinking. You can program multi-level games and applications like calculators. Each object is defined by its set of parameters and how it interacts with other objects. A few friends of mine have used it to introduce their kids to programming and have found it to be pretty successful.

TiFox

http://www.stagecast.com/

>Cocoa is "Java for kids"

You seem to be a little confused. What you're talking about is now called Stagecast.
Everyone else is talking about Cocoa, Apple's Objective-C based API.

'The other Cocoa' eventually found a new home and became known as Stagecast Creator.

-Mark

Actually, what came before both of them, I imagine, was Apple's long-lost *other* Cocoa. Cocoa was a multimedia authoring environment for kids.

Yes, it did come first, but it's not lost! That project was spun off from Apple into the company Stagecast. Apple retained rights to the original name. Actually, the earlier name for the project was KidSim. The prime movers for KidSim were David Smith and Alan Cypher. Larry Tesler was Stagecast president. Both Smith and Tesler originally came from Xerox PARC.

Alice)
Essentially a 3D version of Logo. Users program 3D worlds and have characters which interact. Very cool (and no cost). The underlying language is Python.

Agentsheets
Stagecast
Both very good environments which allow children to build simulations of anything which interests them. They both use visual languages to reduce the need for keyboards.

ToonTalk
Users program robots to perform tasks. All done using programming by demonstration.

Lego Mindstorms
Yeah, don't need to write anything here. It's wicked.

Alternatively, you can wait until I develop my environment, but don't held your breath...:)

The best way "to engage students' creativity and problem solving skills" is computer programming. Several people have suggested some very good special purpose programming languages:

Incredible Machine, Mind Rover, Lemmings (a slight stretch), LEGO Mindstorms, Rocky's Boots (and Robot Odyssey should be included here)

Someone's suggestion to try Java was called "cruel and unusual punishment" and that is probably accurate but some general purpose programming languages are appropriate:

Logo is being used in a few Juvenile Detention Centers. Seymour Papert is involved in such a project.

Stagecast Creator is pretty simple and sort of general.

ToonTalk (my baby) is a general purpose programming language that looks and feels like a computer game.

Stagecast Creator is a program designed expressly for teaching programming concepts to kids. It uses the concept of simulation rather than programming per se, but the characters, behaviors, and variables translate readily into the programming domain once the kids are familiar with the concept of "teaching the computer."

Unlike Logo and Squeak, Creator does not require the students to wrestle with syntax. All programming is done visually. A short tour shows what it's like.

It's written in Java so it should available on almost any platform.

Stagecast Creator is a program designed expressly for teaching programming concepts to kids. It uses the concept of simulation rather than programming per se, but the characters, behaviors, and variables translate readily into the programming domain once the kids are familiar with the concept of "teaching the computer."

Unlike Logo and Squeak, Creator does not require the students to wrestle with syntax. All programming is done visually. A short tour shows what it's like.

It's written in Java so it should available on almost any platform.

Squeak has a lot going for it, but familiarity for Windows users is not on the list. Probably a better choice would be Dolphin Smalltalk; it "feels like Windows" (a good thing in this case), it's a real Smalltalk, it comes with good tutorial documentation, and there's a free (as in beer) version available.

Good news: Smalltalk was designed (back in the 1970s, assuming computers as powerful as we have today!) to be a programming language for kids. Bad news: Really smart kids took to it like fish to water, but most really struggled.

Those of us who cut our teeth on punch cards and Teletypes were used to command line (or worse) interfaces and text programs. Today's kids aren't; even typing Smalltalk programs may bore them.

Consider Stagecast Creator or Toon Talk as a couple of purely visual development environments. They're more suited towards development of games and simulations, but that's a plus if the goal is to get your children excited about programming (probably the right target at first).

Here are a couple of stories about teaching kids to program: This one from Kids Domain has a lot of links to resources, while this one from Suite101.com is an interview (with fewer but entirely distinct links).