Program Composition by Non-Programmers

July 11, 2007
Ken Kahn | Senior Researcher, Oxford University, London Knowledge Lab

Programming by children and other non-experts is usually conceived of as a task that begins with the primitives of the programming language and works upward toward working programs. A promising alternative has been explored by the European Playground Project that gave 6-8 year old tools to build computer games, and the World Weblabs Project that gave 10-14 year olds tools to build simulations, games and exploratory programs in science and math. The core idea is to turn the task of programming into one of composing specially designed editable modular pieces. These pieces are not the usual elements of modular programming but are autonomous composable concurrent processes and behaviors. The presentation will include live demos of the tools developed in these projects as well as other current ongoing projects.

Speaker Details

Ken Kahn first became interested in children and programming as a graduate student at MIT in the 1970’s, where he worked with Seymour Papert and the LOGO group. After research in programming languages and visual programming at Xerox PARC, he left to focus on developing programming systems for children. He developed Toon Talk (www.toontalk.com), a game-like programming system he patented, and recently has been applying his research to helping university students and researchers with no programming experience to build computer models.