[DonHopkins]

Alan Kay was quite inspired by a groundbreaking game series called "Thinkin' Things," which had a visual blocks programming language for controlling and drawing colorful patterns with marching bands, football players, and cheerleaders: "Let's build a halftime show"!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCFNUc10Vu8&feature=youtu.be...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423719

http://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoy...

>Alan Kay on "Etoys, Alice and tile programming": "This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw in the CDROM "Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the set). This project was basically about being able to march around a football field and the multiple marchers were controlled by a very simple tile based programming system. Also, a grad student from a number of years ago, Mike Travers, did a really excellent thesis at MIT about enduser programming of autonomous agents -- the system was called AGAR -- and many of these ideas were used in the Vivarium project at Apple 15 years ago. The thesis version of AGAR used DnD tiles to make programs in Mike's very powerful system."