Constructionism, long before it had a name, was intimately tied to the field of Artificial Intelligence. Soon after the birth of Logo at BBN, Seymour Papert set up the Logo Group as part of the MIT AI Lab. Logo was based upon Lisp, the first prominent AI programming language. Many early Logo activities involved natural language processing,…

A common problem in computer programming use for education in general, not simply as a technical skill, is that children and teachers find themselves constrained by what is possible through limited expertise in computer programming techniques. This is particularly noticeable at the preliterate level, where constructs tend to be limited to…

This paper describes ToonTalk, a general-purpose concurrent programming system in which the source code is animated and the programming environment is a video game. The design objectives of ToonTalk were to create a self-teaching programming system for children that was also a very powerful and flexible programming tool. A keyboard can be used for…

This paper reports on a design experiment in the domain of number sequences conducted in the course of the "WebLabs" project. We iteratively designed and tested a set of activities and tools in which 10-14 year old students used the "ToonTalk" programming environment to construct models of sequences and series, and then shared…