ToonTalk was designed and built by Ken Kahn who, after earning a doctorate in computer science from MIT, has spent over 30 years as a researcher in programming languages, computer animation, and programming systems for children. He has been a faculty member at MIT, University of Stockholm, and Uppsala University. For over eight years he was a researcher at Xerox PARC. He has made several animated films that have been shown in film festivals, theaters, and cable TV. In 1992, Ken founded Animated Programs whose mission is to make computer programming child's play. He received a patent covering the underlying technology of ToonTalk (US Patent Number 5,517,663).

He has participated in several international research projects (Playground, WebLabs, ReMath, and eCraft2Learn) and several UK projects (the BBC Digital Curriculum Project and Modelling4All). He has extended a blocks-based language to enable beginners to build AI programs.

Click here to see his resume. Click here to see some papers he and others have written about ToonTalk.