RAPUNSEL & CREOL – Games that Teach Kids to Program

RAPUNSEL is an on-line computer game/learning system to enable children, especially underprivileged groups and girls, learn to program computers. It is being developed by researchers at the Media Research Laboratory at New York University and TiltFactor Laboratory at Hunter College, New York. The goal of the RAPUNSEL project is to make a “self-teaching” environment, delivered as a web-based service, where children are motivated to learn Java programming incrementally through a shared game. The program is currently targeted at middle school children, and the development team is working with middle school girls at local computer clubhouses as design partners. RAPUNSEL will enable many children across the country to play networked game with their friends, and ultimately create their own games through computer programming.

CREOL is a more ambitious follow-on project with the following goals. In another generation: (i) everybody will know how to program; (ii) nobody will need to learn how to program. The key innovation is to recast a subset of programming as a natural-language-like skill, and to impart that skill to children ages five through seven, while they are still in the age of rapid natural-language acquisition. A community of children will interact with an on-line simulated game world. Children make things happen in this world via a GUI that lets kids build sentences out of word and phrase tiles, using natural English syntax. The GUI restricts interactions to those that are understandable by a software parser. Children learn how to “converse” with a computer in order to get the computer to do things and to answer questions algorithmically. Children will carry this skill with them into secondary school and adulthood. The first children who use the system will intuitively enforce language rules that are easy and natural for children to learn, using their powerful innate natural language acquisition skills, in ways that we as adults could never explicitly design. The decisions made by these children will lead to a new “creole” – in this case a hybrid human/computer language – which can be picked up intuitively by other children.

Speaker Details

Mary Flanagan is an inventor-designer-activist in New York City and leads the tiltfactor research group at Hunter College. Flanagan’s work has been shown internationally at venues including the the Whitney Museum of American Art, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, the Moving Image Centre Auckland, the Guggenheim Museum, and other international venues. Her essays on digital art and gaming have appeared in Art Journal, Wide Angle, Convergence, and Culture Machine, as well as books. Her co-edited collection Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture was published by MIT Press in 2002, and reskin is due in 2004. Flanagan was a commercial software developer in the 1990s, and garnered international awards for her educational software game design. She is also the creator of “The Adventures of Josie True,” the first web-based adventure game for girls, and is collaborating on a new project to teach middle school girls computer programming, “Rapunsel.” Her work has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the Pacific Cultural Foundation, and the US National Endowment for the Arts.

Ken Perlin [mailto:perlin@courant.nyu.edu]http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/kp.jpgKen Perlin is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University. He is the Director of the Media Research Laboratory and the co-Director of the NYU Center for Advanced Technology. His research interests include graphics, animation, and multimedia. In January 2004 he was the featured artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2002 he received the NYC Mayor’s award for excellence in Science and Technology and the Sokol award for outstanding Science faculty at NYU. In 1997 he won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his noise and turbulence procedural texturing techniques, which are widely used in feature films and television. In 1991 he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.Dr. Perlin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University in 1986, and a B.A. in theoretical mathematics from Harvard University in 1979. He was Head of Software Development at R/GREENBERG Associates in New York, NY from 1984 through 1987. Prior to that, from 1979 to 1984, he was the System Architect for computer generated animation at Mathematical Applications Group, Inc., Elmsford, NY, where the first feature film he worked on was TRON. He has served on the Board of Directors of the New York chapter of ACM/SIGGRAPH, and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the New York Software Industry Association.

Date:
Speakers:
Mary Flanagan and Ken Perlin
Affiliation:
NYU Center for Advanced Technology

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