[mercury-users] ToonTalk?

[tom howland]

On 2000-09-06, Richard O'Keefe wrote

> The educational systems in Australia, New Zealand, and the United
> States are extremely good at teaching people that they cannot do
> mathematics.  (I was horrified recently, going through a Richard
> Scarry workbook with my 4-year-old, to discover what *meaningless*
> activities children are expected to do in the name of "math
> preparedness".  My 4-year-old does a lot of the things "wrong" because
> she does something interesting instead.)

I've always been a charmed by the Richard Scary series of computer games. I
especially enjoy "How things work in BusyTown". He also did a math program
for 5 year olds called The Best Math Program Ever. Math at that age group is
focused on recognizing similarities and basic counting operations. I've
never seen his workbooks.

I am hoping you will comment on ToonTalk -- a concurrent logic program
designed for teaching pre-literate children how to program "video games". It
is kind of weird playing with this game and you can feel the notions of
functor arities manifesting themselves in the various graphical objects. I
really want to like it. However, my 7 year old seems confused by it. I guess
he had too much Richard Scarry when he was 4 ...

http://www.toontalk.com/

Another fun development is

http://www.cs.kun.nl/~clean/About_Clean/Platform_Games/platform_games.htm

although I suspect the intended age group is a little higher (9?).

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