The course starts with an overview of the field of visual programming. Visit http://www.cs.orst.edu/~burnett/vpl.html for an extensive bibliography of the field.
The next part of the course will introduce ToonTalk (http://www.toontalk.com) and the Playground Project (http://www.ioe.ac.uk/playground). Try to read as many of the papers listed below, explore the two web sites, and explore the system (installation CD-ROMs will be distributed on the first day of class).
Following this Prograph (http://www.pictorius.com/) will be introduced. You should download the free interpreter version of the system for the web site.
There will then be a 6 or 7 week period where you should work on projects either singly or in pairs. If you choose to work on the ToonTalk/Playground aspect, Playground researchers at DSV will assist you. Email assistance for all projects will be provided during this period.
The following papers are listed in order of importance for the course. Reading all these would be great. Reading the first few is important.
This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC'95). This version has been updated and greatly expanded. It appeared in the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing in June 1996.
This paper appeared in the Proceedings of the National Educational Computing Conference June 1999
This paper was published in the Proceedings of the 1995 Computer Game Developers Conference.
This paper was published in the Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Visual Languages, September 1996.
"From Prolog and Zelda to ToonTalk"
This paper appeared in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Logic Programming 1999, edited by Danny De Schreye, MIT Press, 1999.