Native GUI Squeak?

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at disney.com
Sat Feb 17 22:25:04 UTC 2001


Good questions ...

In short, many children are not interested much in ideas (sometimes 
just in that period in their life, sometimes for most of their life). 
Many are much more socially motivated and/or motivated by their own 
personal narrative. These children are in the midst of stories of 
which they are prime actors.

We got interested in this because, over the years, we started to 
notice that in every experimental group about 5% (sometimes as much 
as 10%) of the children went directly to the heart of the matter. 
These were the children who were successful with LOGO on a wireframe 
screen and in the early days of Smalltalk with limited graphics. What 
was going on with (say) the next 70-80%?
      Well, given the recent success of Kim Rose's experiments with 
teacher B-J Conn at the Open School, one answer is that some of these 
kids needed "costumes on their turtles". They were happy to program 
if the result was some element in their story.
     Typical exchange. What was the most fun thing about this project? 
"Learning to drive the car". What was the most difficult thing about 
this project? "Learning to drive the car". The scripting (including 
learning what a variable is in a deep way) was in the noise of this 
kid's reasons for living. But the kid really learned what we wanted 
him to learn in a deep and consistent manner.

Now this is actually old hat Montessori, who noticed a lot more than 
most people about 100 years ago. Her idea was: "So what, let the kids 
play, let's make sure their toys have great side effects". She would 
argue that for quite a few years in a kids life it was of no matter 
why a child read (there could be many individual motivations) as long 
as the kid got fluent.

As a musician, I believe that the thing to do with children in music 
is make sure they have fun getting fluent, whether they have a deep 
early calling, whether it is social fun, or whether they are a 
character in their internal opera. There are many more turning points 
ahead for them, and children's minds develop at different rates and 
in different directions.

Math and Music to me live very near each other, and so I think the 
same thing about math with kids. The main thing is to get them to get 
fluent enough in some of the real stuff (for whatever reasons we can 
supply) so that later turning points will find them with a foundation 
that can then be wielded in new directions.

As for papers, the stuff we are hoping to release in mid March will 
include quite a few projects from Kim's and B-J's work (and play) at 
the school last Spring and this Fall, (as well as some other school 
projects in JHS and HS in Kansas and elsewhere). There are 
discussions, chronicles, movies, pictures, projects that kids made, 
and some overviews by yours truly about where we think we are this 
time around.

We have had enough experience now with the etoys that it is time to 
start making something that is more like a curriculum with a little 
more "build" to the scheme ....

Cheers,

Alan

------


At 4:35 PM -0500 2/17/01, Jochen F. Rick wrote:
>I said:
>>  >I'm not sure that's what you actually meant. A 10 year olds' main payoff
>>  >is not only drawing and driving the car. I would argue that the main
>>  >payoff is the accomplishment that comes with doing something new (making a
>>  >script to control a drawing) and creating an artifact (a fairly functional
>>  >car). Drawing the car on a computer is probably not too exciting, nor does
>>  >the scripted car compare with modern video games. But, yes, the symbolic
>>  >is extremely powerful.
>
>Alan replied:
>>  Yes, I meant that too ... but an amazing amount in that example comes
>>  from actually learning to drive the car (according to the kids ...).
>
>Hmm. That's interesting. Why? Would they be as interested if they drew a
>car and someone else had implemented the driving capability that realized
>its car potential?
>
>Or does learning to drive really mean exploring the object soas to
>increase mastery and insight? For instance, I liked playing with the
>Lego toys I made, not just because I made them or because they were fun, but
>because playing with them gave me ideas of what to build next.
>
>BTW, are there any papers on the etoys yet?
>
>Peace and Luck!
>
>Je77





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