The Early Examples of Kedama, A Massively Parallel System in Squeak

This paper presents an overview of a massively parallel programming system that the author has been developing and also a few examples of the system. This system, named "Kedama", provides specialized programming construct to express particle simulation. This helps in the math and science education in school setting where the students don't have particular programming training. Kedama is deeply inspired by StarLogo, the previous work in the domain. However, Kedama has a few notable differences from the previous works. Firstly, scripts can be constructed in a graphical user interface. This GUI is very similar to the well-known Squeak eToys and users can write scripts with little effort. Secondly, the system allows dynamic changes while it is running. It lets users modify their program and explore their problem domain quickly. Thirdly, the notion of the Observer script and Turtle script are unified. A user can freely mix the global actions and turtle actions in one script with little constraint. This paper introduces the concepts and semantics of the system, and discuss the examples that illustrate how to access these features. The simulations this paper discuss are bouncing atoms, the epidemic and pixel manipulations.