Slashdot Mirror

The only way to stop boring people is to stop being boring.

I think it's a lot more complex than that.

Of course it is.

We're starting to see news stories that children can operate tablets, but can't use building blocks.

Future-shock news stories are a perennial favorite. The news story you linked is Yet Another concerned teachers story. Come to me when you have the results of a peer-reviewed research study to share.

A friends daughter can use a tablet, but she also reads (or something close to it), and plays with lots of actual toys and the like. But they know some children in her age group which seem to have some lesser skills when it comes to actual physical tasks instead of digital ones.

Anecdotes, confirmation bias, and hearsay. I mean, seriously, come on... how the heck do you know how much those other kids play with toys at home, or whether they might just naturally be less adept at these things, or even whether your friends might be naturally biased in favor of their own kid's abilities?

You start a 2 year old playing games on your smartphone or tablet, and they're going to always view it as a game.

In your opinion. A 2013 report from The Milennium Cohort Study showed conduct problems, emotional symptoms, and relationship problems among kids who spent more than three hours a day watching TV and other video content, but did not show the same negative behavioral effects from age-appropriate videogames.

I can't tell you how often I see mothers with their very young children playing on the phone as a keep them quiet measure.

In public. Where their kids might otherwise be climbing on the clothing racks in the store, like I did, when I was a kid, because I was incredibly bored. So what?

Are they doing the same thing at home? You don't know. The previous generation left the TV on to keep their kids out of their hair. As I showed above, that may actually be worse.

I'm not saying that it's not possible that tablet or phone usage may be causing some kind of trouble. I'm saying that I want real, scientific evidence of this, and not piles of "concerned" people spouting unproven hypotheses and biased anecdotes. Those are no basis by which to form any kind of sane public policy or parenting guidelines.

And I'm not at all surprised to see that by the time they reach school they've not got the attention span (or in some cases motor skills) they should.

Anecdotally.

And, if every time they've gotten bored or fussy someone gives them a phone, then when they hit school and that's not really an option, they're going to have NO idea of what to do, because they've always been given these things to keep them quiet. They've never learned that sometimes they have to suck it up and deal with it.

And thirty years ago, this would have read: "And if every time they've gotten bored and fussy someone puts them down in front of a TV, then when they get to school and that's not really an option, they're going to have NO idea of what to do, because they've always had a TV to keep them quiet. They've never learned that sometimes they have to suck it up and deal with it."

Me, I'm not surprised at all that people are seeing this.

I'm not surprised that there are people who see the Virgin Mary in pieces of toast.

Hell, I see a lot of kids where they're all looking at their phones -- and I wonder if they're texting one another from 3 feet away instead of interacting wi

http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/8938/1/6908_gcse_english_literature.pdfseems to think otherwise, but I'm not a teacher, and did mine in 2002.

When I took my GCSEs in 1995, there was one single paper - and my GCSE certificate (having just checked) only has "English" on it.

I was in the upper bounds of the year, so I certainly wouldn't have been left out of any exams (if you could even be left out of a core subject!)

After a bit of investigating to jog my memory I've remembered what English and English Literature GCSEs were about:

English:
- reading lots of newspaper articles from different newspapers (e.g. Mirror and Telegraph), and explaining the bias, bad arguments, irrelevancies etc. (My main memory of my English teacher is him reading something from the Daily Mail, then reading it again and shouting out every "may", as in "it's is thought that immigrants MAY have ...")
- reading a few poems
- "speaking and listening" -- a presentation, and listening to everyone else's presentation

Didn't have any of that - poems were covered in lower years, but nothing at GCSE exam level.

English Lit:
- what you said

I don't remember where the Shakespeare and novels went -- probably some in both.

This was the only subject of any English lessons I had, and the only exam I took on the topic was orientated toward what I commented on earlier.

Nice to see the haters are out today - having a nice time are you?

I understood the books I was reading very nicely thank you - I just didn't give a fuck about English Lit (and I still dont). And no, they weren't separate subjects when I was taking GCSEs (mid 1990s) - it was just "English".

http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/8938/1/6908_gcse_english_literature.pdfseems to think otherwise, but I'm not a teacher, and did mine in 2002.

its just that "English" as taught today (as in my day when I took GCSEs) has little to do with mastering the various technicalities and abilities of the written and spoken word, and much more to do with contrived, manufactured investigations into so called "literary classics"

After a bit of investigating to jog my memory I've remembered what English and English Literature GCSEs were about:

English:
- reading lots of newspaper articles from different newspapers (e.g. Mirror and Telegraph), and explaining the bias, bad arguments, irrelevancies etc. (My main memory of my English teacher is him reading something from the Daily Mail, then reading it again and shouting out every "may", as in "it's is thought that immigrants MAY have ...")
- reading a few poems
- "speaking and listening" -- a presentation, and listening to everyone else's presentation

English Lit:
- what you said

I don't remember where the Shakespeare and novels went -- probably some in both.

I am told that Alison Wolf, who is now Professor of Education, Head of Mathematical Sciences Group and Executive Director of the International Centre for Research in Education has some of the answers in her new book "Does Education Matter? Myths about education and economic growth. (Penguin Press). Have any slashdotters read it?

As the author of ToonTalk, I'd like to clarify this a bit. ToonTalk is a descendant of Prolog (via Concurrent Prolog, Herbrand, and Janus). See the paper "From Prolog and Zelda to ToonTalk". But equally accurately one can describe ToonTalk as a concurrent object-oriented system. Teams of robots correspond to the methods of an object. They typically run concurrently (in different houses or on the back of pictures) and they communicate and synchronize by giving birds messages to deliver to their nests. While there is no notion of inheritance, delegation is straight-forward to program.

And despite the sophisticated underlying computation model, it is appropriate for 6 year olds (as well as adults). See for example the European Playground Project that has been helping 6 to 8 year olds build computer games in ToonTalk.

- ken kahn

Let me explain why programmability is such an important thing by starting with these two quotes:

Alan Kay ("Computer Software'", Scientific American, September 1984) wrote:

"The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited. It is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated. Even more important, it is fun, and therefore intrinsically worth doing. ... Computers are to computing as instruments are to music. Software is the score, whose interpretation amplifies our reach and lifts our spirit. Leonardo da Vinci called music ``the shaping of the invisible,'' and his phrase is even more apt as a description of software."

Danny Hillis in his book "Magic in the Stone", Basic Books, 1998 writes:

"These days, computers are popularly thought of as multi-media devices, capable of incorporating and combining all previous forms of media - text, graphics, moving pictures, sound. I think this point of view leads to an underestimation of the computer's potential. It is certainly true that a computer can incorporate and manipulate all other media, but the true power of the computer is that it is capable of manipulating not just the expression of ideas but also the ideas themselves. The amazing thing to me is not that a computer can hold the contents of all books in a library but that it can notice relationships between concepts described in the books - not that it can display a picture of a bird in flight or a galaxy spinning but that it can imagine and produce the consequences of the physical laws that create these wonders. The computer is not just an advanced calculator or camera or paintbrush; rather, it is a device that accelerates and extends our processes of thought. It is an imagination machine, which starts with the ideas we put into it and takes them farther than we ever could have taken them on our own."

OK, so then what happens. Sony, Nintendo, Sega, etc. take these wonderful computers and close them off to everyone but licensed developers. Of course, the PS2 is a computer whether YABASIC is bundled with it or not. But it is important news that a computer that has the potential of reaching tens of millions of homes will not be completely closed (at least in Europe). Sony should release YABASIC in the rest of the world as well.

Is Basic the best choice of a programming language for the PS2? We could argue about what other languages would have been better (and that might be fun), but the important fact is that some general purpose programming language is there. Suppose some other language X is twice as good as Basic. The percentage increase from Basic to X is 100% improvement while from nothing to Basic is an infinite improvement.

Having said that, I'd like to plug my own language, ToonTalk, as a much better choice. Rather than typing text with a virtual keyboard and then trying to read a program on a TV screen, in ToonTalk you construct your program from inside of a game world. You train robots, give birds messages to deliver, drop things in boxes, use animated tools, etc. to construct and run programs. No need for a virtual keyboard. No need to try to read text on a TV while sitting 10 feet away on the couch. And children much younger than 10 are making games with it.

-ken kahn

Before I try to answer this question, as the author of ToonTalk, I'm very pleased with all the interest that these SlashDot discussions have generated in ToonTalk. So much interest that www.toontalk.com has become overloaded so I made a mirror at www.animated-programs.com/ToonTalk.

So if ToonTalk started beta testing in 1995 then why isn't it better known? Well first off beta testing revealed that too few kids were comfortable with just exploring ToonTalk unaided. So I generated many narrated demos, puzzle sequences, and added Marty, a speaking guide/coach, to ToonTalk. Also beta testing revealed that while kids really mastered the basic stuff in ToonTalk they found the sprite/game stuff confusing. So that needed to be completely redesigned and rebuilt. (And I'm proud to say that it is working so well now that a big European research project is using it to enable 6 to 8 years to build their own games - see www.ioe.ac.uk/playground.)

So ToonTalk was ready in 1998 and I showed it to more than a dozen publishers of kids or educational software. The typical response from the technical people was very positive and from the marketing people I heard comments like "It is too hard to explain", "We're not in the business of educating customers", and "What line or two on the box could make it sell in big numbers". A publisher in Sweden was the first exception, followed by one in the UK, then Portugal, and then Brazil. And a Japanese version is in final testing.

So ToonTalk was self-published in North America. This means there is no marketing budget and a small PR budget (already spent). So it has been spreading by word of mouth, nice articles like the one in Dr. Dobb's Journal (Feb 99), some things I've written (e.g. March 2000 Communications of the ACM), and forums like this one.

Best,