Programming languages for children have been limited by primitive control and data structures, indirect user interfaces, and artificial syntax. Playground is a child-oriented programming language that uses objects to structure data and has a modular control structure, a direct-manipulation user interface, and an English-like syntax. Integrating Playground into the curriculum of a classroom of 9- to 10-year-olds has given us valuable insights from the programs intended users, and confirmed many of our design decisions.

Home computer users are just now discovering computer graphics. Modest extensions to BASIC allow plotting but not much more. The Bally Home Library Computer, however, has hardware to aid implementation of video games. Custom integrated circuits working on a 160×102 pixel (2 bits per pixel) color television screen allow certain forms of animation in real time. To give this power to the user, BASIC Zgrass has been designed and implemented. It is an extension of BASIC that allows parallel processes, picture objects that move, scale and group together as well as several drawing modes. There are also software controls of a three-voice music synthesizer, interactive input devices, a film camera and an IEEE bus interface. We will concentrate mainly on the language design for making it all easy to learn and use.