Educational uses for Rev

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Sat Aug 14 03:01:13 EDT 2004


Marian Petrides wrote:

> That s*cks!  On the other hand, Discovery Systems who used to market 
> Course Builder (not to be confused with the Adobe product of the same 
> name) had my undying loyalty because whenever you asked them a tech 
> support question, not only did they answer it they often also included a 
> sample snippet of code.  Kinda like what folks do on this list.

More "small world" xTalk trivia:  Course Builder was what Bill Appleton
made before he made SuperCard.

What I found most interesting about talking with him on that was his
disappointment with iconic programming:  he felt it was ultimately too
limited to be very useful for anything but the simplest of tasks.  That
disappointment with iconic programming became a big part of his
motivation for making a scripting product.

I've been looking into iconic and other visual programming tools as a
possible answer for education tool, a la KidSim.

But the more I look into it, the more I've noticed one salient oddity
about visual programming languages as a whole:  most papers published
about such things span from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, with almost no
new developments in the last decade.  Indeed, commercial tools like
Cocoa (the original SK8-based sim-building tool which later became
KidSim), Prograph, Icon Author, and Authorware are either dead or dying.

So is it the case that all of the truly visual programming languages are
gone?  Or have I just missed some really cool work going on out there?

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more:  http://www.fourthworld.com/rev



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