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Isn’t it crystal clear that this last and most important service is quite lacking in today’s computing for the general public? Apple with the iPad and iPhone goes even further and does not allow children to download an Etoy made by another child somewhere in the world. This could not be farther from the original intentions of the entire ARPA-IPTO/PARC community in the ’60s and ’70s.

Even this is disingenuous because Apple doesn't in any way prevent a people from creating a good app uploading it to the store for free and let people download it for free.

Alan Kay is talking about a system where children can easily create toys, games, learning tools, etc in an authoring environment that they can use and then share those creations with others, and you suggest that instead they create an Apple(tm) iPad(tm) "app" and load it on the Apple(tm) App Store(tm)? This is what Alan is talking about, not a corporate-controlled cash cow. How many pre-teens do you know that are creating iOS applications? We're talking about tools to help kids learn about computing and technology, not a system that a child prodigy can use to stun adults by being proficient at. That's what Alan is talking about, and I don't think that is being disingenuous. I also don't think that you know more than Alan Kay. Once you've been a fellow at Xerox, Apple, Disney, and HP, then you can come with your valuable expertise to let us know how great the Apple ecosystem is for teaching kids about computing and technology.

Jumping in here although there are many places in this thread where I would like to comment.

Some points made by others I agree with: 1) Laptops were too expensive, big, and heavy, 2) battery life was not good enough, compounded by OS designers resource-hungry designs, 3) teachers set in their ways, 4) lack of software compatibility, 5) inadequate WiFi coverage and bandwidth.

Over ten years ago I started the Open Slate Project to develop an educational solution similar to what Mr. Fowlkes describes, and I certainly agree with the article's headline. In my concept, an app called Super Chalk Board functions in a client-server manner to transmit data, including live, even hand drawn, input from any slate to any slate or group within the classroom. The display is in layers (think GIMP or Photoshop) with the top layer being notes made by the slate user (student). The slate would have enough storage to hold a reasonable amount of material locally, so that review, study, even homework assignments can be done without a network connection. Sessions would be recorded so that a student who missed class could download the session from home or when they return.

While searching for a way to implement Super Chalk Board I came across Squeak Smalltalk and am convinced that it would made the ideal foundation for Open Slate's software, which I dubbed Chalk Dust. I have used a book morph to create a sample of a first generation Chalk Dust application. Still not networked, but even so rich in potential. Much has been done by the Etoys team to bring Squeak to young children.

The Open Slate Project has been languishing lately but the rise in inexpensive hardware has inspired me to restart it. Anyone interested can look over the somewhat outdated site and sign up for our (low volume) mailing list. Always looking for contributors, or help of any kind for that matter.

Squeakland

And where is today's LOGO equivalent for young kids to get into elementary programming?

Here it is, a complete pure object-oriented development environment where even the pixels are objects and can be introspected just by clicking on them and poking their properties.

Pick any language and look how much background knowledge you need to have to merely create a trivial program to put a pixel on a screen and draw a few lines

Nope, those are trivial tasks with Squeak. The one-hour demo lesson that VPRI does ends with the children drawing cars, writing programs to control them, and creating an event-driven object oriented system without realising that they're doing any more than playing.

http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

This essay could be considered supporting Alan Kay's suggestion that
"the computer revolution hasn't happened yet".
http://squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/face_to_face.html

Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools
by Paul D. Fernhout
January, 2007

Educational technology has been a big success at homes, in libraries, in
museums, and in business.

Let's say you have an interest in, say, Aardvarks. At home and want to
know the weight of a typical aardvark right now? Google it:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=aardvark+weight
Want to buy one? :-) Try Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Safari-Aardvark/dp/B000H6H4VK
Want to sell one you no longer need? Try ebay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Aardvark-Direct-Pro-Q10-PCI-Audio-Interface-w-CubaseLE_W0QQitemZ270076288454QQihZ017QQcategoryZ64446QQcmdZViewItem
Want to collaborate with others on making one better? Try sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aardvark
Want a 3D simulation written by an aardvark?
http://flyawaysimulation.com/article746.html
Want to make your own educational simulation about aardvarks? Try one of
the tools linked here:
http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html
An endless variety of information related to just one arbitrary topic,
easily accessible using Google or another search engine.

At the library, want to find a good book on, say, Zebras? Use an online
library catalog system:
http://leopac.nypl.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?menu=search&aspect=basic&npp=10&ipp=20&ri=&index=GW&term=zebras

Want to make a museum kiosk showing protein folding in action in 3D? Write
a simulation with Python:
https://simtk.org/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=&topics=18+307

Does your business need to know more about "quality control" to prevent
customer complaints? Lots of online resources:
http://search.dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=quality+control
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_control

So, at home, library, museum, or business, technology is delivering the
goods (physical or digital) and making these places all a lot better.

With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still
considered a problem area, see:
"To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html
Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools?
Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other
places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not
much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.

Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting
"learning on d

Check out this http://www.squeakland.org/ . It came from Smalltalk, I guess, and has lot's of visual reward for the kids, very educational. And prepares for OO. It has been tested along OLPC project and has had very good results. Worth a try

I've taught five groups of 8 to 15 "work experience" kids from local high schools, year 10 to year 12 (15 to 18yo), using http://squeakland.org/ Etoys. Most of them hate computing classes they do in school: learn how to use Office. I tell them the visual language isn't designed for them but kids 6yo and up. Then I teach them the simple car (turtle-like), the car with a connected steering wheel (functional programming), and then the car staying on track by sensing fences in about 40 minutes. Zero programming experience (in most cases) to environment sensing (I call it AI) programming in less than an hour.
One bright kid figured out how to spawn cars and managed to create a race.

...people need to understand the concepts of bits, bytes, words, longwords, binary/octal/hex numbers, thinking sequentially and logically,
what an operating system actually does, what an IO system is and does, how a computer actually does math, etc., etc., etc.

I think there's a careful distinction to be made in such a discussion, between fundamental concepts and implementation details. For example, I think knowing binary is an important skill for a casual (non-professional) programmer, whilst hex isn't so much since it's just used as a more compact form to displaying binary in for humans*. Similarly bits are important, bytes not so much since the notion of 8 bits in a byte is just an arbitrary standard. Knowing things like the distinction between float and double, short and long, etc. isn't IMHO suitable for such an age group. This is because learning such things enough to be second-nature is often difficult since they're arbitrary and thus will probably rely on rote-learning (ie. they're boring) but more dangerously, since they would always be in the student's mind when they're taking the course it would distract them from the actual concepts being taught.

At University every computing course I took was based in Java (though I learned C and C++ from my Physics classes too), and it showed: Masters level students would struggle to grasp important steps in straightforward algorithms, yet their incorrect coursework implementations would show a clear appreciation for such irrelevant details as serialise versions (in code destined to never have a subsequent version), extraneous exception handler definitions (most of which would actually leave the state in a broken way) and elaborate layering of objects for streams, readers, writers, buffers, builders, factories, etc. to get data into and out of their wrong, one-method implementation of the algorithm, in a text-book-exact way (sometimes not even changing the variable names).

My recommendations for things to include:

Message-passing Object Oriented programming; no throwbacks from structured programming like if/then/else, for/foreach/while/dowhile, etc. Stick to one concept that has no special-cases, and languages with as few reserved keywords as possible (since lots of keywords implies that some things need to be achieved via some non-pervasive concept, usually hard-coded into the compiler/interpreter). Here I would recommend Smalltalk ( http://www.smalltalk.org/main/ ), since it's been taught to children for years all over the world, so there's lots of experience to build on. It's based on objects with classes which send and receive messages, and essentially defined OO programming as it's known today. There's very little syntax to learn, if/then/else are messages sent to objects (eg. myCondition ifTrue: myTrueCode ifFalse: myFalseCode), loops are also messages (myListOfObjects do: myLoopBody) and so on. The distinction between classes and instances might be unnecessarily confusing, so you *may* want to look into languages like Self ( http://selflanguage.org/ ) which use prototypes in a similarly pervasive way. Smalltalk also has Etoys ( http://www.squeakland.org/ ) to play with, which is a prototype-based 'ultimate LOGO' and really makes the message-passing concept of OO explicit via the menu structure. DrGeo ( http://community.ofset.org/index.php/DrGeo ) runs in Smalltalk, which provides an incentive to kids to learn the system (since it would give those students who learn it an advantage in Maths classes, since they'd have access to a really sophisticated geometric calculator). Scratch ( http://scratch.mit.edu/ ) is built in Smalltalk too, but bears little relation to the underlying system (whereas with Etoys it is a simple step to pure Morphic, then to classes/instances, then t

'm a Perl person, so many will say I shouldn't comment on this at all. I've spent about 35 years 'sweating over a hot computer' as someone once said and I still enjoy a lot of it, although I've partially retired.

If you read the history, BASIC was designed to give access to computers to non-techies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC and this is the one belief that uncle Bill [we can't say his name here, can we?] and I share.

I showed my son some basic BASIC stuff on an Oric Atmos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_Computer_Systems in about 1988 [the dates in wikipedia don't seem quite right] mainly: 10 PRINT "HELLO" ; GOTO 10; as he was quite small. He's been programming pretty much, ever since, but he grew up around it too.

I'm not going to get into a flame war about GOTO or Basic in general, but script languages and some of the open source Basics that are left are pretty good. I've been teaching a neighbour some Perl too, at about this level. I wouldn't try and teach them PHP before doing some of this more 'linear' stuff either. I've been experimenting with Scratch and especially etoys: http://www.squeakland.org/ and I really like the visual object model but, if you're an adult, you can't use it for simple accounting for example or parsing a file. So a lot will depend on intended purpose and age of pupil as previous posters have said.

Depending on his skill level and interest, I would try Squeak. Scratch and Etoys work well with younger kids.

Someone else said you can't force someone to program. I agree with that, but people don't always know what they're going to like. Give him things to explore and maybe he will become interested. Try not to be offended if he doesn't.

I learned to program, aged 7, because of games. We had one class a week that covered programming on the BBC micro (one for the entire class) in BBC BASIC and Logo, but we could use the computers at lunch time or after school if we wanted to. I got the basics of flow control and 2D drawing from the class and then taught myself until I arrived at university for a CompSci degree (I then stayed to do a PhD). The first games that I wrote were things like 'guess the number I'm thinking of,' first where the computer would come up with a random number and tell you if you were too high or too low. Then the computer would try to guess the number you were thinking of (where, aged 7, I worked out the idea of a binary search, and then had logarithms explained to me when I tried to work out how you could find the number of guesses required). I then wrote some graphical games, mostly on my Psion Series 3. When you're using an interpreted language on something with a 2MHz 8-bit CPU (the BBC) or a 3.84MHz 16-bit CPU (the Psion), you really start to think about algorithms; no amount of microoptimisation can make up for poor algorithmic choices.

I also started writing a lot of programs that weren't games, generally things to automate things that I found tedious. Programming these days is a life skill in the same way that reading was a hundred years ago. It should be taught in schools to everyone, not to a few people in university, and games are a good way of doing it. These days, we've moved on from BASIC (thankfully), and I'd recommend Squeak eToys as the best introduction to programming. It's a fully object oriented environment and teaches good programming practices from the start (unlike BBC BASIC, which supports them but encourages unstructured programming).

"DIY" and software do not appear together often enough.

I would teach them how to create their own personal "apps" using Squeak. Use Nebraska to collaborate and share in class. Look for a few techies to help.

To get stared, try Sugar on a Stick and look at Etoys, a specialized subset of Squeak. (You use Squeak to create Etoys.)

http://www.squeak.org/

http://squeakland.org/

http://www.sugarlabs.org/

Nebraska: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1356

Wider range of info: http://squeak.zwiki.org/SqueakNotes

A recent class at University of Illinois: https://agora.cs.illinois.edu/display/cs598rej/Spring+2009;jsessionid=3BA508D972A809064DC117DBDF7C36C8

I definitely would go for teaching young children, who would benefit (and need it) more and also be more receptive to technology. If every child learned some basic programming (say, Python or some shell scripting), they would grow up into much more savvy end users.

For younger kids, things like LittleWizard and EToys are a good way to introduce the concept of programming without worrying about syntax.

I have both of these, and some good Python-based games, as part of a Linux distro for kids at:
http://www.quinncoincorporated.org/

Ok, a little off-topic but it would also look great on your resume. Come to Peru and help me teach programming to orphan kids in Peru. Im building a course in squeak (smalltalk, like LOGO on drugs :) to teach programming to the kids. The orphanage has over 630 kids and is all volunteer-run, with some volunteers living inside, mostly europeans. Watch some videos of the orphanage, its a youtube playlist and the last 2 videos are in english. I also have a software business with many years of experience working as a C++ programmer in top US software companies, and might be able to teach you a trick or two.

Ok, a little off-topic but it would also look great on your resume. Come to Peru and help me teach programming to orphan kids in Peru. Im building a course in squeak (smalltalk, like LOGO on drugs :) to teach programming to the kids. The orphanage has over 630 kids and is all volunteer-run, with some volunteers living inside, mostly europeans. Watch some videos of the orphanage, its a youtube playlist and the last 2 videos are in english. I also have a software business with many years of experience working as a C++ programmer in top US software companies, and might be able to teach you a trick or two.

And for even younger kids, eToys: http://www.squeakland.org/

an instance of Unix - perhaps PC-BSD, or possibly that Finnish fake called Linux. Yes, it's quite possible. I know a 9 year old who installed Kubuntu successfully. He needed to be told the 'phone and IP numbers of the ISP, but that's all. Then connect a green text terminal to it and get them to understand that typing commands does not result in a fate worse than death, you know, something like creating serious laundry problems. Once they get the idea that it's ok to touch a keyboard, they might like to risk having their little minds corrupted by being entertained by one of the GUI oriented packages such as: Alice; Scratch; or perhaps the Squeak Smalltalk E-Toys?

• The canonical portal Notice the links in the LH column.
• The Highly Graphical and Fun One. Free Software.
• The One for Children. Free Software.
• The Super Fast One Available for unsupported use gratis, but not Free Software.
• The Big Commercial One. Commercial software, but gratis for personal and non-commercial use.
• Free Online Books

If he gets a reasonable grasp of the principles of these, I assure you he can look forward to a very profitable and rewarding life.

I'd start here http://www.squeakland.org/ the environment is based on smalltalk 80 and is pretty pure OO, so even though it looks like a toy they will 'get their mind right'.

On the surface it has a fantastic drag'n'drop tile based scripting layer that allows kids to quickly get toy and demo things working - building both familiarity with concepts, confidence, and interest. This http://www.squeakland.org/school/drive_a_car/html/Drivecar12.html jumps into instructions for a 5 minute draw a car and write the program to bind it to a drawn steering wheel. You can quickly progress to programs with sensors doing track following. I've used it to make flocking games (like herding cows etc) for the amusement of my kids.

It is intended that you can drop under the scripting and start using the full OO smalltalk (http://www.squeak.com) classes, inheritence, coding while you debug while you run. OS integration, OpenGL bindings, links to DBs, multimedia, a whole host of good stuff.

The idea is to give them something it's easy o come to grips with but that is OO, open, and as deep as you want to go.

I'd start here http://www.squeakland.org/ the environment is based on smalltalk 80 and is pretty pure OO, so even though it looks like a toy they will 'get their mind right'.

On the surface it has a fantastic drag'n'drop tile based scripting layer that allows kids to quickly get toy and demo things working - building both familiarity with concepts, confidence, and interest. This http://www.squeakland.org/school/drive_a_car/html/Drivecar12.html jumps into instructions for a 5 minute draw a car and write the program to bind it to a drawn steering wheel. You can quickly progress to programs with sensors doing track following. I've used it to make flocking games (like herding cows etc) for the amusement of my kids.

It is intended that you can drop under the scripting and start using the full OO smalltalk (http://www.squeak.com) classes, inheritence, coding while you debug while you run. OS integration, OpenGL bindings, links to DBs, multimedia, a whole host of good stuff.

The idea is to give them something it's easy o come to grips with but that is OO, open, and as deep as you want to go.

Did you look at the link I provided? If you had, you'd see that, through this simple graphical programming (that the kids don't even really realize they're doing), they can learn things like math:

Clearly, something interesting has been captured here by these 10 year olds. Going a little and turning a little over and over seems to make circles. Adults may remember something complicated about x2 + y2 = r2 and wonder why this way is so simple. It's because when looked at from the view of an ant on the rim of a circle, a circle is just a track of constant curvature. All the ant has to do is keep its moving and turning going at the same rate to trace out a perfect circle.

This way of looking at geometry is called "the differential geometry of vectors" and is the main mathematics used by science. It is used by scientists because it is simpler and more powerful than the general math taught in K-12. It is worth pondering this paradoxical irony.

To paraphrase a famous quote: It's the software, stupid!

The OLPC is much more than a library, it's also an easy-to-learn graphical development environment. You're right: an EEE with Squeak would be almost as good (I say almost, because the OS might not be modifiable). But even the most powerful laptop in the world without Squeak would be utterly useless.

I don't see teachers in sufficient numbers being prepared to take advantage of open source. In Brazil (where I live), I see teachers that can barely teach their subject with a blackboard and white chalk.

So what? Teachers aren't required. The potential is built into the machine itself; the kids will discover it.

[Youtube link]

I don't get it; aside from the horrible translation, that looks like a successful start to me! Granted, they were only using the thing for research (as opposed to simulation and collaboration), but you can't expect them to figure that out in a week when the teacher has never used a computer before. Maybe they need to give the teachers an orientation that includes having them explore this.

What was it in that video that you object to?

Unfortunately, because ideally one would want to be able to go very, very deep. The project seems to fall short in that respect.

How so? The computers run Squeak and Linux specifically in order to enable the kids "to go very, very deep!"

Take a look here for kidz stuff for the OLPC... http://squeakland.org/

After getting proficient with the E-Toys, they might like to progress to Blender, which has the Python programming language built-in.

"In the 1970's we shot a lot of film of this on an air hocky table and took measurements from the photographs to calculate displacement of the objects photographed under a strobe light."

And technology can add to that today. While we have to use technology with our eyes wide open, there's no reason why we cannot be exponentially smarter because of Moore's law. Just as an example, Alan Kay said something like "a different context is worth 80 IQ points" when he talked about very young children intuitively doing calculus (in a quantitative manner too) using the Squeak system. There's video demos and such on the Squeakland website. Additionally, I've found the chatter on the mailing list to be particularly interesting.

It's about 2 mouse clicks and six words to install EToys into a squeak image. I fail to understand the point of this article - EToys is probably being used in Cuba already as it's a great environment to let kids loose in, see http://www.squeakland.org/

However, he does have a point. Is access to computers an amazing boon to education? If that was the case, every student would have his own laptop in class in the first world, such as where I live.

Not only is that illogical "reasoning" but it's based on a false assumption and it's the wrong question. The false assumption is that if access to computers is a boon to education that every student in the first would would have a laptop. A secondary false assumption is that the benefit to a third-world student is the same as the benefit to a first-world student.

The actual, useful question is, can we give children in the third world more education by spending $170 on a computer than by spending it in some other way? I believe that the answer is yes. But I will explain why after I pick your comment apart a bit more.

There are some students who do bring laptop in their courses, but from what I have seen, all they seem to run is MS Word, whose function can be imitated very well with a stack of paper, a pencil and perhaps a marker or two.

Actually, one of the most serious problems in African schools (in particular - obviously the third world is not homogeneous) is a lack of paper. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them is the same reason that paper books are not a workable solution - paper burns nicely. Computers don't burn as nicely, in fact they are often designed to be flame-retardant meaning that lighting them is difficult. And an average textbook will provide a lot more BTUs than the OLPC. This is one reason why computers have a higher value to third-world students than they would in the first.

Another reason is that one OLPC can be a whole collection of textbooks - and the OLPC project is also developing and assisting in the development of Free (as in speech) educational materials.

To sum up, textbooks and paper are hard things for kids in the third world to keep their hands on. But the laptops might not be, especially if there is any support from the local government in punishing those who steal them. And since they're the ones laying down the money, they may indeed be motivated in that direction.

Oh, I might add that computers are in general not used intelligently in education in the first world. But the OLPC systems (and not Intel's ClassmatePCs) are designed to be a learning tool, not just a computing tool. They will come with educational materials and software, including Squeak, which is a remarkably approachable programming tool (though the default interface leaves much to be desired... like sanity.) It will also provide extremely easy-to-use tools for collaboration and the like, which are implemented within the Sugar interface. And the wifi system not only acts as a mesh network, extending the network's reach, but it also is a little computer that will run when the system is deactivated, and still perform this function.

If you can't see how these many tools have the potential to improve the quality of education (and thus, down the road, the quality of life) in the third world, then I feel you are sorely lacking in imagination.

Squeak looks like a simple paint program, but painted objects can have properties and behaviors. The Drive a Car tutorial shows the basics of Squeak. Squeak.org provides much more detail about how Squeak extends Smalltalk. Squeak is free and supported by a large user community.

ToonTalk presents a 2 1/2 dimension cartoon world with animated tools and characters that can learn activities. Very weird. ToonTalk 2 costs $25 and has promised version 3 for over a year.

Squeak looks like a simple paint program, but painted objects can have properties and behaviors. The Drive a Car tutorial shows the basics of Squeak. Squeak.org provides much more detail about how Squeak extends Smalltalk. Squeak is free and supported by a large user community.

ToonTalk presents a 2 1/2 dimension cartoon world with animated tools and characters that can learn activities. Very weird. ToonTalk 2 costs $25 and has promised version 3 for over a year.

Squeak Smalltalk http://www.squeakland.org/ and http://www.squeak.org/ are open source educational tools for K-12. eToys is in the One LapTop Per Child. It's in there because it's an open source educational tool.

I would ask those actually excited by this announcement to please inspect Croquet, a collaborative, three-dimensional framework for cooperative computing that is built atop Squeak, the modern implementation of Smalltalk by Alan Kay and others.

Croquet is Open and Free now. It's in its early stages, but so is second life.

I don't know if Croquet is an excellent choice for building a metaverse, but I'm pretty sure it's a better choice than Second Life.

I would go so far as to say that most of the games on the system should be implemented in the Squeak environment, which will be provided on the OLPC. For those who don't know and are too lazy to link surf, Squeak is the latest descendant of Smalltalk developed by Alan Kay (and a host of others.) It's designed very much from the standpoint of education. It has a lot in common with logo; every graphical object is a "turtle" and besides being able to set its position you can rotate it, move it forward and back turtle-style, draw lines with it, etc. The typical demo is to draw a car and click the forward box in its properties to make it start moving forwards, then to click left and right to make it turn. Then you draw a steering wheel and when you turn it you can see its rotation number go up and down in the little properties box. You can actually drag that number over to the turn amount for the car and bingo! You can steer it. It's very very friendly, but you can drop into the code interface and you get access to all the power that is smalltalk, not that I know jack diddly about that language yet. But Squeak always runs in a VM so you can count on applications running the same on all supported platforms, at least to a much much higher degree than Java... In fact Java came out of the Smalltalk project in a way. It was an attempt to solve the same problems - an unnecessary and misguided attempt, perhaps :)

This proposed system to get better math and science educators and educations sounds like a meritocracy approach

...until you consider the fact that they want to base their salaries on the performance of their class.

There are several problems with this idea. The first, and most serious in my mind (but I am Not a Teacher, I have only discussed this with some of them) is that this will be based on standardized testing. As we all (should) know, testing is actually a poor indicator of future performance. Some people simply do poorly with tests.

The second problem is that, as any teacher will tell you, most parents take far too little interest in their children's education. Or, as many of us have realized, far too little interest in their children in general. How is a teacher supposed to teach when the children go home and turn off their brains, and their parents give them no reason to turn it on again?

There is a third problem, which is the standardized curriculum. Our teaching methods are, well, downright stupid. But they are mandated by law. Let me give you a personal, concrete example of what I mean. I'm a fairly bright guy (some of you would disagree, but you can attempt aviary copulation with a ventrally rotating toroidal pasty) but one thing I've just never really been able to retain is mathematics. I really don't retain things unless I actually understand them, it's just the way I learn. Or in this case, don't. But no attempt has ever been made to actually teach me how math works. It's all about rote memorization and applying someone else's formulas, which you are expected to remember even though there are literally millions of places to look them up.

I watched one of Alan Kay's wonderful videos with which he promotes his computing environment Squeak. In this video he talks about how we do not actually teach science or mathematics in school. One brilliant example is that in fractions you used to cross-multiply (which is how he learned at home) and now you invert and multiply (same thing) in order to divide one fraction by another. This is actually a bit of algebra and when you actually get to algebra you have enough math to prove the invert-and-multiply method. But in fact we never actually do that and you will not be proving anything until you get to Calculus, which is not a requirement to graduate High School, nor is it a requirement for most college degrees! So in fact we never teach anything about how mathematics actually works to most people who have college degrees. And you don't REALLY learn much about the mechanisms of mathematics unless you take Discrete Mathematics or Math Theory or some other class that focuses on such things. Of course, such classes are designed to be impenetrable unless you have already taken a bunch of other courses in which you use math without understanding it.

So what we are teaching in school is not actually math, but math appreciation. And this continues for most people who have a degree; even teachers typically don't really understand math. This is not a joke. This is not inaccurate. It is the gospel truth. Your children (should you have any) are probably learning math (and science, although I won't go into that discussion since it's so similar) from someone who does not understand it.

I thought logo was pretty cool, although frankly they didn't try and teach us much of it. But regardless I would rather see Squeak used. Logo is procedural, and that's great, but Squeak is also object-oriented and much more approachable than Logo. The OLPC Project is putting Squeak with a project called etoys on their system, thank goodness. I think I could have learned a lot more in Squeak... And anyway, it does everything logo does, except make you learn a language you'll never use again.

Personally, I still don't understand why they didn't just use Squeak for the interface, since it was developed for the same purpose (and by the same guy, for that matter) and already exists and works well...

So what is out there that is more expansive and powerful than second life? Do you suppose we'll all end up living in squeakland?

You know, most people here (including you) seem not to have noticed what this thing is actually about. It's not just a normal Linux distro! For this purpose Visual Studio would not be the "best IDE," because the OS is the IDE!

Perhaps you don't realize it, but the entire point of these things is that they'll be running hackable Free Software. In particular, they're designed to run Squeak, which itself is designed to help kids learn by enabling them to program little physics simulations and such, as well as see how the entire software system works.

Not putting Squeak on these machines would, frankly, make them entirely worthless.

I think the Squeak project is worthy of note for anyone interested in a first programming environment. Start em off right.

Squeak homepage

and the Education focused site

However, trying to put object-oriented concepts into a form that children can easily adapt to seems a lot more difficult than one might believe.

Yeah... this is why Alan Kay and a host of like-minded folk hove put together squeak, a Smalltalk based tool for teaching kids about programming. It is inherently OO (like Smalltalk) straight out of the box, and eases into these principles pretty nicely.

Of course there's the question of whether it's worthwhile teaching kids OO concepts before other concepts as I'm not sure which way the easier direction of flow is.

Smalltalk has been very successful language for kids, especially its Squeak environment. Good places to start with http://squeakland.org/ and http://www.whysmalltalk.com/

I'm not a teacher, but Alan Kay and the fine folks at Viewpoints Research have been helping kids learn (K-12) for many years. They have created a wonderful scripting language on top of Squeak (derived from Smalltalk-80) called eToys. Many are using this around the world. You might get in touch with them.

Here are the relevant links:

http://www.viewpointsresearch.org/about.html
http://squeakland.org/
http://www.squeak.org/ (to learn more about Squeak)

--
brad fuller
sonaural: www.sonaural.com
personal: www.bradfuller.com
                    www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2184

If the teacher finds the Smalltalk paradigm incomprehensible I'd suggest (s)he try Ruby. The author, quite truthfully, claims it's a 'surprise-free' language. Together with Smalltalk it's one of the few truly Object Oriented programming languages. It's been reported that both Squeak and Ruby are going to be installed on the OLPC machine. ( The OLPC folks change their minds so frequently that I'm now not certain of that though )

I recall seeing Squeak (based on Smalltalk) being used in schools in Extremadura. The government used Linux on some 60,000 computers..

Here's the report from 2005:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-768010651 3348266522

Web-sites:
http://squeak.org/
http://squeakland.org/
http://smalltalk.org/

• Squeak Toys
• More Squeaking
• Very fast implementation
• For grownups
• The Smalltalk Portal

• Postgresql RDBMS

• Free Smalltalk Library
• PostgreSQL Book

What is it with you people?!?! Does it occur to you there is more things to Heaven and Earth that can be dreamt in your philosophy, Horatio? Why is it every person trained on using a hammer thinks all problems can be solved by hammering it?!?!?!

The real problem is that Windoze doesn't come bundled with a programming language???

Its 2006. Have you not heard of a computer communication network called... the Internet? You can do really neat things like... download all the programming packages in the world that one would wish to use! You are a man dying of thirst floating in the middle of a freshwater lake because you're too stupid to realize its potable water keeping you afloat!!!

And why would one think the best way of introducing kids to computers is using crippled, archaic language technologies like BASIC??? Introducing kids to BASIC is the computer science equivalent of CHILD ABUSE! "It was good fer me, its what'll be best for my kid." Yeah, my dad felt the same way about using a belt when we got out of line. Some people grew up in Sudan; I guess chewing narcotic leaves and learning to kill people with AK-47s is the best way to raise an adolescent.

You don't see me telling kids to learn FORTRAN and COBOL when I was a kid. And hell, you can program games in COBOL too! I deliberately keep a copy of COBOL TREK in case I'm trapped, and only have access to a 370.

The kid wants to learn to program? Teach them to use a webbrowser and google.com, and they can go download the java SDK. Do you really think writing something like:

10 J=SQRT($I)**$VLOG
20 POKE(J)
30 SPRITE(J*X,F)
50 GOSUB 470

...is clear and easy? Compared to java???

Java too hard? Try this. Its as straightforward as BASIC, its an object oriented language, and much more conceptual and educational. Hell, it even caters to kids, here.

There's no way you can get started easily.

UNBELEIVABLE! Is it me? Am I the only one here who sees mentally crippled BASIC programmers?!?!?

The problem with a PC method of learning is that there are too many distractions, or at the very least, there is not yet a good method of using a PC for instruction - although that will probably change.

Smalltalk, because you are completely isolated from the boring mechanics of programming. Nasty things like files, editors, compilers, linkers.
http://www.smalltalk.org/main/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk

Smalltalk, because there are 2 very good free (gratis),
http://www.exept.de/exept/english/Smalltalk/frame_ uebersicht.html
http://smalltalk.cincom.com/index.ssp

and at least 2 Free ( Libre ) implementations.
http://www.squeak.org/
http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/smalltalk.ht ml

Smalltalk, because is was deliberately designed for small people to have fun,
yet you can grow-up with it.
http://www.squeakland.org/

Smalltalk, because it is well documented.
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/FreeBooks.html
http://www.whysmalltalk.com/tutorials/visualworks. htm

In a couple of words, it Just Works, and your sanity will not be harmed.

If you can't drop the "program in a file" paradigm, then checkout
http://www.ruby-lang.org/
http://www.python.org/

Don't even dream about anything BASIC because your dreams will turn into really horrendous nightmares before you can even turn around twice.