If you'd like to do some pre-reading before the Vivarium showing, I dug up a few things that might give you a sense of what the project was about:

Alan's 1991 Scientific American article.  (The Vivarium material starts a few pages in.)
        http://www.vpri.org/pdf/sci_amer_article.pdf

Bobby Blatt, the principal of the Open School at the time, contributed a chapter to Alan's 70th-birthday tribute book.  (p. 55)
        http://piumarta.com/pov/points-of-view.pdf

Larry Yaeger has a write-up online, more technically-focused than the others.
        http://shinyverse.org/larryy/VivHist.html

Frank Rose's 1987 profile of Alan, as the Vivarium project was underway.
        http://www.frankrose.com/alan-kay-pied-piper-of-the-computer.html

> On May 5, 2015, at 8:22 PM, Michael Nagle wrote:
>
> Hello all!
>
> Rob and I are still planning on showing videos from the VPRI archive focused on the Vivarium project on Tuesday, May 12, @ 7 pm. Note that often videos are shown on Mondays but Tuesday May 12 is in fact a Tuesday.
>
> We're planning on showing a few introductory videos and then letting people explore and leave notes on the archive.
>
> [from the audience]
>
> Q: What's the Vivarium project?
>
> A: As I understand it, the Vivarium project was a deep collaboration primarily between Alan's research group at Apple and the Open Charter School in Los Angeles from '86 to I believe '93. It allowed children and classrooms to create virtual ecosystems to explore in conjunction with the ongoing work of the school. The interfaces allowed students to draw animals and record sounds for them as well as program behaviors for the various animals and organisms.
>
> I personally find this project interesting as it both shows a very deep and respectful collaboration between a technology-based initiative and a school, and also seems to have an important role in the lineage of Constructionist software from LOGO to modern environments like Scratch.
>
> Q: So will there be printers?
> A: It's likely.
>
> Q: And 😄?
> A: 😉 (also likely.)
> Q: Pistachios?
>
> A: Right. So in a former email, I described the Vivarium project as an un-opened pistachio in a bowl full of pistachio shells: a gem inside of an area I thought I had thoroughly explored. It turns out I have a sizable gap in my understanding of Constructionist media, and that the more I learn about this project, the more it appears to me to be part of the spine of Constructionism.
>
> Q: ...ok. Real pistachios?
> A: Definitely.
>

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