some news

Daniel Vainsencher danielv at tx.technion.ac.il
Sat Apr 22 17:02:34 UTC 2006


Moving sideways in this discussion - as long as mentoring is more 
important than content, the number of kids that can be "infected" at any 
given time is bounded by the number of people able to do the mentoring. 
I expect mentors are even rarer than computers where the 100$ laptop is 
headed.

Haven't there been any serious attempts to make systems in which the 
content itself takes the user on a reasonably long and useful ride even 
with no mentoring?

I had about 3 years of fun with Basic and about 500 pages of exercise 
booklets, and nothing more. I think two important elements to that 
success were that the Commodore64 had zero extraneous interface, and 
that the booklets started from explaining the keyboard.

Why can't the booklet be part of the environment, and improved until 
mentors can be banned from the room with no/little ill results?

Daniel

Alan Kay wrote:
> I agree that content is really important, and even more so is 
> mentoring. The language is less so providing it doesn't develop 
> limited ideas (like BASIC did).




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