Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox PARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface. There he also led the development of the influential object-oriented programming language Smalltalk, both personally designing most of the early versions of the language and coining the term "object-oriented." He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He received the Turing award in 2003.
Smalltalk is a purely object oriented programming language (OOP), which was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learning Research Group (LRG) scientists, including Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Diana Merry, and Scott Wallace.
Squeak is an object-oriented, class-based, and reflective programming language. It was derived from Smalltalk-80 by a group that included some of Smalltalk-80's original developers, initially at Apple Computer, then at Walt Disney Imagineering, where it was intended for use in internal Disney projects. The group would later go on to be supported by HP labs, SAP, and most recently, Y Combinator.
Adele Goldberg is an American computer scientist. She was one of the co-developers of the programming language Smalltalk-80 and of various concepts related to object-oriented programming while a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), in the 1970s.
The KiddiComp concept, envisioned by Alan Kay in 1968 while a PhD candidate, and later developed and described as the Dynabook in his 1972 proposal "A personal computer for children of all ages", outlines the requirements for a conceptual portable educational device that would offer similar functionality to that now supplied via a laptop computer or a tablet or slate computer with the exception of the requirement for any Dynabook device offering near eternal battery life. Adults could also use a Dynabook, but the target audience was children.
Write once, run anywhere (WORA), or sometimes Write once, run everywhere (WORE), was a 1995 slogan created by Sun Microsystems to illustrate the cross-platform benefits of the Java language. Ideally, this meant that a Java program could be developed on any device, compiled into standard bytecode, and be expected to run on any device equipped with a Java virtual machine (JVM). The installation of a JVM or Java interpreter on chips, devices, or software packages became an industry standard practice.
StarLogo is an agent-based simulation language developed by Mitchel Resnick, Eric Klopfer, and others at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab and Scheller Teacher Education Program in Massachusetts. It is an extension of the Logo programming language, a dialect of Lisp. Designed for education, StarLogo can be used by students to model or simulate the behavior of decentralized systems.
Morphic is an interface construction environment which uses graphical objects called "Morphs" for simplified GUI-building which allow for flexibility and dynamism. It was originally created for Self, but later, was ported to other programming languages like Squeak, JavaScript, Python, and Objective-C.
Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls Jr. is a pioneer of object-oriented computer programming and the principal architect, designer and implementer of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the bytecoded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical in 1976. He also invented bit blit, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap computer graphics systems today, and pop-up menus. He designed the generalizations of BitBlt to arbitrary color depth, with built-in scaling, rotation, and anti-aliasing. He made major contributions to the Squeak version of Smalltalk, including the original concept of a Smalltalk written in itself and made portable and efficient by a Smalltalk-to-C translator.
The Croquet Project is a software project that was intended to promote the continued development of the Croquet open-source software development kit to create and deliver collaborative multi-user online applications. Croquet is implemented in Squeak Smalltalk.
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) was a non-profit initiative established with the goal of transforming education for children around the world; this goal was to be achieved by creating and distributing educational devices for the developing world, and by creating software and content for those devices.
Constructionist learning is the creation by learners of mental models to understand the world around them. Constructionism advocates student-centered, discovery learning where students use what they already know, to acquire more knowledge. Students learn through participation in project-based learning where they make connections between different ideas and areas of knowledge facilitated by the teacher through coaching rather than using lectures or step-by-step guidance. Further, constructionism holds that learning can happen most effectively when people are active in making tangible objects in the real world. In this sense, constructionism is connected with experiential learning and builds on Jean Piaget's epistemological theory of constructivism.
Tweak is a graphical user interface (GUI) layer written by Andreas Raab for the Squeak development environment, which in turn is an integrated development environment based on the Smalltalk-80 computer programming language. Tweak is an alternative to an earlier graphic user interface layer called Morphic. Development began in 2001.
Fabrik is a visual programming integrated development environment implemented in Smalltalk and designed at Apple Computer by Dan Ingalls, Scott Wallace, Yu-Ying Chow, Frank Ludolph, Ken Doyle and others during the mid-1980s. It consists of a kit of computational and graphic user interface components that can be "wired" together to build new components and useful applications.
The Classmate PC, formerly known as Eduwise, is Intel's entry into the market for low-cost personal computers for children in the developing world. It is in some respects similar to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) trade association's Children's Machine (XO), which has a similar target market. Although made for profit, the Classmate PC is considered an Information and Communication Technologies for Development project (ICT4D). Introduced in 2006, the device falls into the then popular category of netbooks.
The OLPC XO is a low cost laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world, to provide them with access to knowledge, and opportunities to "explore, experiment and express themselves". The XO was developed by Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT's Media Lab, and designed by Yves Behar's Fuseproject company. The laptop is manufactured by Quanta Computer and developed by One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization.
Pharo is an open source, cross-platform implementation of the classic Smalltalk-80 programming language and runtime. It is based on the OpenSmalltalk virtual machine called Cog (VM), which evaluates a dynamic, reflective, and object-oriented programming language with a syntax closely resembling Smalltalk-80.
Physical Etoys is a free open-source extension of Etoys developed by Gonzalo Zabala, Ricardo Moran, Sebastián Blanco and Matías Teragni at the Universidad Abierta Interamericana. Etoys is an object-oriented and prototype-based visual programming language created by Alan Kay for the use in education. Physical Etoys contains the majority of Etoys characteristics. Its philosophy is "help kids model and program the real world in order to learn more about it". Physical Etoys lets different electronic devices such as Lego NXT, Arduino boards, Sphero, Kinect, Wiimote joystick, among others, be easily programmed and interact between themselves due to its block scripting system.
In 2010, Physical Etoys won the first innovation technology award given at the ESUG conference.
Ted Kaehler is an American computer scientist known for his role in the development of several system methods. He is most noted for his contributions to the programming languages Smalltalk, Squeak, and Apple Computer's HyperCard system, and other technologies developed at Xerox PARC.
