Islay — An educational programming tool based on state diagrams

This tool allows children to describe how autonomous characters in their video games should behave at the minimal cost of understanding ovals (states) and arrows (transitions). Its use in educational practices for a decade has confirmed that the tool helps children find their own talent and understand the fundamental concepts of computers such as finite state machines, concurrent processing, object classes and instances. Enthusiastic users run into the combinatorial explosion of states. Then it is the time for them to move on to the structured programming languages where they can use variables to represent states.