LOGO-L> Toontalk evaluation

[Doug Merrill <dmerrill@us.ibm.com>]

This is my initial evaluation of Toontalk and a comparison with Logo.  I
got to Toontalk and the Logo newsgroup by typing "Computer Programming
for Children" into an internet search engine.  I have an 8 year old son
who spends "too much" time playing computer games.  I thought that I
might get him interested in writing his own computer games.  I have
MSWlogo installed and we are working on a quiz game.  His idea is to ask
the user quiz questions.  If the answer is wrong then the fuse on a
picture of a bomb will burn down.  After a certain number of wrong
answers the bomb explodes.  We have gotten a good start on making the
bomb work.

Some things I really like about Logo are that it is versatile.  It looks
like you can do anything with it - text, pictures, movies, interaction.
The papers at the Logo foundation web site have lots of ideas and sample
code, too.

When I first saw the demo version of Toontalk I was very excited.  My
son loves computers and Legos.  I enjoyed and was challenged by the
puzzle game.  However, in the puzzle game and in free play I ran into
some iritating problems.

1.  Placing the hand and other objects in the right place is difficult.
It is hard to press the button on Dusty.  It is difficult to find the
right placement of a large text object to put it in a box.  Perhaps you
(Ken Kahn) can put a red dot on each object to indicate its "hot spot".

2.  The floor gets cluttered fast.  The window gets filled quickly with
notebooks, tools, robots and birds.  To get rid of a notebook I have to
press F2 to get Dusty (this takes several seconds), then put him down to
check his button setting, pick him up to suck up the notebook.  Then I
have to hope there is nothing important under the notebook that gets
sucked up by mistake.  It would be nice to be able to point to an
object, press the delete key and have it disappear.  Also when the robot
is done with the toolbox he does not put it back where he got it from
(sound like anybody in your house?).  I spent some time looking for a
bird only to find that the robot had put the toolbox on top of it.  A
zoom feature would be nice for looking for things. That is easier than
panning across the floor, and standing up does not allow you to see
objects clearly.  Perhaps you could have a toolbar instead of the tool
box.  A toolbar is out of the way and won't get covered up.  The user
could right click on the object in the toolbar to get a new copy and
left click on the object on the toolbar to make all of those objects in
the main screen float up to the top.

3.  The puzzle game was excellent for teaching me how to do things.  It
got very long, however.  A couple times Marty said "We're almost done",
but we were not.  I quit after the section on the clock and started
working on my own.  But, how much did I miss?  What are the upcoming
topics?  Is it worth my time to go through them?  I cannot find answers
to these questions.  The puzzle game needs a table of contents and a way
to jump to a specific section I am interested in.  This brings up the
whole concept of help.  Traditional Windows help has a table of contents
and an index (just like a real book).  Toontalk does not have this, Logo
does.  When I am learning a new computer language I want a reference
book where I can look up the syntax of what I want to do and get
examples that I can cut-and-paste.  But there is no cut-and-paste with
Toontalk.  I have not seen the trading card manual (Is it one card for
each character?), but I cannot imagine that the cards would have enough
information on them.  Would they correspond to a quick reference page?

4.  This leads to a serious problem for Toontalk.  I cannot edit my
program.  Several times in the puzzle game I made mistakes - I did
things in the wrong order, handed the robot a box with the wrong number
of holes.  But I had no way to go back and change it.  This happened in
the Ping-Pong demo.  The programmer made the paddle wrong.  She/he had
to get rid of the bad paddle and create a new one from the beginning.  A
big advantage of using a text based language is that I can edit and
re-use (cut-and-paste) code.  An Undo command would be very helpful
while I am on the floor creating my program.  Better yet - is there
someway to edit aminmation based programs?  There were several times
during the puzzle game where the only way to get out of a mistake was to
blow up the whole building and start over.  This seems extreme to me.  I
imagine children would get very frustrated.

I showed Toontalk to my son.  He looked at some of the demos and then
wanted to write his own program to make the buildings blow up.  He had
not paid close attention to how it was done in the demo, but he knew it
involved a bomb and a truck.  He put the bomb in the truck - Marty came
to say that was not possible, bomb needed to be in a box.  (This was
very good - context specific help.)  My son put the bomb in a box and
the box in the truck.  The truck did not move. I told my son that I
thought the truck would only move if there was a robot in it.  Together
we made a program that made continuously exploding buildings.  He liked
going up in the helicopter and watching the buildings explode.  I asked
him what he wanted to do next and he asked me if I thought we could make
an airport with airplanes taking off from it.  I told him I did not
think so.

This is a problem.  Toontalk looks like Legos, so kids will want to do
Lego-like things with it.  I don't think Lego-like things are possible -
are they?  A house is not just a house, it is a metaphor for a
computational process.  The only way to build a house is to create a
process to happen inside it.  And I have no choice in what the house
looks like.  Also, all the action happens inside the houses.  If I make
a city I want to be able to walk around and see things happening (like
SimCity).  But all I will be able to see in Toontalk is trucks, birds
and explosions (let me know if I am wrong).

I am having a hard time imaging what I can do with Toontalk that would
interest me.  The Ping-Pong game looks very crude compared to the
initial "wow" of the first encounter with Toontalk.  How would my son
make his quiz game in Toontalk?  I tried putting text on the wall of the
room - it was clumsy.  But then again, Toontalk is an animated
programming language, maybe it doesn't do text well.  What does it to
well?  I am the kind of person who needs lots of examples.

On the other hand I was blown away by the 3D examples in MSWLogo.  I
want to make a sphere with land masses colored on the surface and make a
GIF movie of it (the earth) rotating.  I wonder how much computer time a
movie of, say, 12 frames would take.  Now I understand better how
computer animation is done and why Hollywood computer animation requires
lots of time and memory.  Logo makes me imagine things and wonder about
things.  I can imagine making a Logo airport with my son - make a bitmap
of an airport as the background, then turn the turtles into airplanes
and program them to fly.  It would be 2-dimensional, not as pretty as
Toontalk.  But is something like that even possible with Toontalk?






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