Here you'll find a discussion of how ToonTalk is being tested in schools. A general description of ToonTalk is found on the Adults ask - What is Toontalk page.

Beta testing of ToonTalk began in January 1995 at the Encinal School in Menlo Park, California. A class of fourth graders taught by Ruth Colton was given a half hour demo and then in pairs used ToonTalk. Each session was 30 to 40 minutes and about 6 children used ToonTalk each week. Notes were taken as they used the system and the system maintained a replay log of their actions. When the children were confused or asked questions, they were helped. Whenever appropriate, they were instructed to find the answer from ToonTalk's help system personified by Marty the Martian. In September 1995, November 1996, and September 1997 this was repeated with Mrs. Colton's next fourth grade class.

The purpose of this testing was not to conduct a carefully controlled scientific experiment. The good news from working with about 50 students is that they found ToonTalk very appealing and had few problems mastering the basic operations of a sophisticated concurrent programming language. They understood how to train robots, give birds messages, etc.. About 10% were confused about training robots (the essence of ToonTalk programming) even after two 30 minute sessions. These positive results are more impressive when one considers that during this period ToonTalk was evolving and contained many system bugs that the children encountered. Also many small problems surfaced. For example, ToonTalk used the left mouse button for picking up and dropping things and the right button for using something in your hand. Many children repeated got left and right mixed up. ToonTalk now by default does not distinguish between different mouse buttons. You now press the space bar to use what is in your hand. There were literally hundreds of such changes as a result of observing the children using ToonTalk.

To be honest, neither the children in Mrs. Colton's class nor the several dozen or so beta testers in homes have constructed more than small simple programs. It seems that children have no troubles understanding the basic building blocks of ToonTalk programming but lack the design skills or programming techniques to construct larger programs. Good teachers can help here. To address this problem, ToonTalk now includes about ten examples ranging from simple to silly to serious computer science to building a Ping Pong game. These examples are presented as narrated demos. Another experiment underway is to present examples as illustrated instructions much like those that children use to build Erector® and Lego® models. An interactive tutorial with a narrative structure has recently been added. We are hopeful that we will soon begin to see larger and more sophisticated programs from the children.

We would love to have more beta testers both inside schools and out. Two teachers at the Råbyskolan school near Stockholm, Sweden have started to use ToonTalk in classes. Keio University in Tokyo Japan has been testing ToonTalk for quite a while with university students as has the Taiwan National University.