Monday, October 30, 2006

Beautiful educational software :)

So many of you are probably aware that my job (ie: research assistantship, ie: how I'm getting gradschool paid for) is to work on JES, the Jython Environment for Students -- it's the little IDE that we use at Georgia Tech to teach introductory CS classes to non-majors and for summer camps as part of our "media computation" effort. A number of other schools use our stuff too, which makes me pretty happy. We're releasing a new version soon, and it's going to rock hard and be faster and include LOGO-style turtles! I'll put up links when it's out.

But speaking of LOGO-style turtles and media computation:
- The KDE Project has KTurtle out now, which looks pretty cool. It's part of their bigger KDE Edutainment effort.
- TuxPaint is also pretty cool! My friend (and noted cartoonist) Brett finds it pretty amusing. It reminds me of KidPix, which you might remember from your childhood if you're about as old as me -- and that's still out there, apparently?
- Tux Paint comes to us from New Breed Software, which has a bunch of other cool educational products.
- And if you only click one link on this post: Pictures Kids Made With TuxPaint

And, for completeness:
- Alice is a programmable 3D environment up outta CMU that rocks harder than I can describe in a quick blog post. As they put it on their site, "Alice will make programming a means to an exciting end." That exciting end is really easy 3D storytelling.

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