According to the OLPC project (One Laptop Per Child), the people who are building a sub $100 laptop so that kids in developing countries can become 3lit3 hackers too, the new device will come pre-loaded with a visual smalltalk based development studio called Squeak, and a fun animation / programming toy called Scratch.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/jxDw-t3XWd0" width="400" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
I found the video mostly very annoying, once you skip past the beginning they get into a demo of the environment. Basically it’s a drag & drop scripting environment with an emphasis on animation and sound.
You can program flash-style animations and drag and drop the scripts in real-time - the animation changes in real-time as a consequence. I guess that the individual modules are objects written in Smalltalk, which can easily be extended.
I also like the idea that these laptops will present new users with a whole bunch of new programming languages and VB is not one of them.
0 Response to “Scratch - Smalltalk based realtime programming (for kids)”