No one has mentioned Loki because Loki went out of business three years ago, taking with them the meager royalty payments to a bunch of game companies (including mine) and hosing a whole bunch of employees. I'd like to tell you what I really think of the people who ran Loki (as opposed to the employees, who were by and large fantastic), but the guy has a tendency to sue people who say things he doesn't like.
Loki was a special case of the general rule of porting Windows software to Linux: you won't make as much as you spend porting it.
MindRover is a PC game where you design the AIs and let them compete.
And before that there were Omega and Carnage Heart (Playstation).
None of those were "learning" games, though.
Galapagos, for the PC, was a game where you had to train an object to navigate challenging terrain. Negative reinforcement came from both the user and from "losing". It was *wayyy* too easy to cause your robotic bug to stand quivering at the edge of a cliff, unable to decide to move anywhere.
Back in '93 or so I was the UI designer on a visual programming version of VB that Lotus developed (and later sold to Revelation software). We had "links" between UI elements and code snippets so that you could build basic VB apps without actually breaking out the text editor. It worked pretty well as an accelerator for basic application development, but eventually you ended up writing text-based code. It just saved you time getting started.
I liked the idea so much I went out and built a game around it -- MindRover (http://www.mindrover.com/) where players constructed robots using purely visual programming techniques (no text-based code at all). It worked, and it was great for a game, but it made for a cumbersome development process. It's hard to look at an image and see everything you need to see.
Visual programming is cool and fun. It makes the learning curve for programming a little flatter, and it can be a nice way to prototype stuff and get the early versions of an application running. But using it to build apps that are more than toys is a much bigger challenge, and I haven't seen anyone yet who has done it effectively.
The original poster's research looks an awful lot like a demo I saw at MIT Media Lab about 5 years ago. IMO, it exposes a bit too much of the syntax of conditionals and things in the visual UI. It's not far enough from textual programming to be helpful.
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No one has mentioned Loki because Loki went out of business three years ago, taking with them the meager royalty payments to a bunch of game companies (including mine) and hosing a whole bunch of employees. I'd like to tell you what I really think of the people who ran Loki (as opposed to the employees, who were by and large fantastic), but the guy has a tendency to sue people who say things he doesn't like. Loki was a special case of the general rule of porting Windows software to Linux: you won't make as much as you spend porting it.
MindRover is a PC game where you design the AIs and let them compete.
And before that there were Omega and Carnage Heart (Playstation).
None of those were "learning" games, though.
Galapagos, for the PC, was a game where you had to train an object to navigate challenging terrain. Negative reinforcement came from both the user and from "losing". It was *wayyy* too easy to cause your robotic bug to stand quivering at the edge of a cliff, unable to decide to move anywhere.
I liked the idea so much I went out and built a game around it -- MindRover (http://www.mindrover.com/) where players constructed robots using purely visual programming techniques (no text-based code at all). It worked, and it was great for a game, but it made for a cumbersome development process. It's hard to look at an image and see everything you need to see.
Visual programming is cool and fun. It makes the learning curve for programming a little flatter, and it can be a nice way to prototype stuff and get the early versions of an application running. But using it to build apps that are more than toys is a much bigger challenge, and I haven't seen anyone yet who has done it effectively. The original poster's research looks an awful lot like a demo I saw at MIT Media Lab about 5 years ago. IMO, it exposes a bit too much of the syntax of conditionals and things in the visual UI. It's not far enough from textual programming to be helpful.