Rodent support for kids
Computers have existed for a number of years without rodent support. You may be surprised where your mouse tail leads if you give it a tug and lift the lid off your computer cover.
Alan is credited to be the inventor of Smalltalk, the first computer system to pioneer a WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers). Smalltalk was developed in the Learning Research Group at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970's. It later became the inspiration and technical basis for the MacIntosh and subsequent windowing based computer operating systems. Bill has weblogged a nice quote collection of futurist quotes by Alan Kay.
Squeak is a modern, highly portable, fast and full-featured implementation of Smalltalk. Squeak is a media authoring tool that can be used by kids to create their own media or share and play with others. Students can use Squeak to learn more about how the world works. It is an excellent game development platform and includes some game source codes to get users started including Chess, Freecell and Mines. In a weblog post by Don Box is an interesting review why he chose this programming language for his kids to learn at home. Squeak is free to download and Open Source.
I am also interested to read on Wikipedia Squeak that Alan Kay and other contributors are using Squeak to working together on the Croquet project that will offer a networked, real time, collaborative workspace with 2D and 3D abilities. Sounds cool heh?
Time for me to start a new pet project by downloading a free copy of Squeak then having a look at the Squeak training introduction and tutorial. (squeak, squeak..)