Educational Programming Tools
for kids, youth and adults

Programming
CONTESTS

Baltie is an educational graphic oriented visual programming tool for kids, children, youth and adults. Baltie is also main character of this software a little wizard keen to execute miscellaneous commands and to conjure pictures (tiles) in his scene. With Balties help children will quickly realize what is a computer and how to master and program the computer. All that by playing. Baltie can be used also for exercising logical thinking. It makes no demands on child's knowledge, only playfulness and imagination are required.

Baltie software has three modes with increasing complexity and capability: Building a scene , Conjuring a scene, Programming. If you want to switch to another mode click the Modes button.

1. Building a scene (from 4 years): The first mode serves for mastering the computer. Children will learn to use the mouse, to paint a picture, to save a file, to open a file and to name a file. All that only using pictures and icons.
2. Conjuring a scene (from 5 years): At the second mode children will learn to master yet not the computer but their pal Baltie. They will learn to give commands correctly which Baltie carries out with no answering back. Commands are given simply by a mouse click on the corresponding icon. Baltie executes each command immediately after the click. At this mode children are learning decompose every complex action into a sequence of simplest commands which Baltie understands.
3. Programming: The top and most interesting mode. Children creating their own program will understand the best at this mode what is the program and what is the computer. Programming is easy for children since they are only placing elements one by one which represent commands for Baltie. The program created starts after pressing START (PLAY) button.
   There are several levels of programming mode in Baltie.

The Advanced programming mode includes work with following features: Animations, multimedia, procedures, variables, selections, loops, graphics, spray, colors, fonts, date, time, stopwatch, mouse, keyboard, files, folders, mathematical functions, send project via e-mail, etc.

Baltie is a way from the first touch with the computer, through understanding its working, to mastering the most important methods of software creation.

See the two examples of simple programs below:
- program "Text editor" - just 1 (!) line of source code
- program "Conjure"     - 8 lines of source code