I too hope that real world construction sets never dies. As you point out there is some value in the repetition forced by re-building. But I'll argue that good virtual construction sets have many advantages.
I think debugging can be a great learning opportunity. Consider the problem solving involved in generating theories of where the bug might lie, in then finding it, and fixing it. A very general skill. And with software one can track down and fix many bugs per hour. With real world creations most of your time is spent taking things apart and putting them back together. (With LEGOs at least this is much less painful than with Erector/Mechano sets.)
I too see the value in kids doing more than moving a mouse and using a keyboard. Maybe we need to build richer interfaces to our computers.
Cliff wrote: Computer-based sets, would be a nice alternative, but nothing
beats the real thing where children can use their own hands to create
something they can show their paernts.
I'd like to argue with that. Software is so much more flexible and maleable
than things in the real world. You build a robot arm with LEGO Technics and it
doesn't work what do you do? You have to pull it apart to fix a small bug. Then
you get it working and you want to add a nice little new feature. What do you
do? You pull it apart to enhance it. Software is magical in that you can change
it without disassembly and reassembly.
To my way of thinking there are lots of great software based construction kits
and many have been mentioned in this thread (e.g. Pinball Construction Kit,
ClickTeam's Klik and Play, Incredible Machine, StageCast Creator, and SimTunes)
but the ones mentioned are either not universal Turing Machines or are
universal only in a theoretical sense (way too awkward to do some things). (Or
are professional programming languages that are really not kid-friendly.)
What gets me excited are universal construction kits. Examples of this are
Squeak (and its EToys), Agentsheets, Logo, Boxer, and my ToonTalk. These are
all kid-friendly program development environments. Software-based special
purpose construction kits are fine, but general-purpose ones give kids access to
the true power and magic of computers.
And of course kids can "show their parents" software they have built. And the
parents are likely to be more impressed than a LEGO construction.
So they force the service to be taken down so AT&T or the like bids more. The creditors don't want to lose 4,000,000 times $16/month (that portion of the fees that go to Excite) but they figure this way they can pressure AT&T to up their bid.
"A trillion computers do a billion operations per second in 120 micro liters solution. One computer performs one operation per 1000 seconds on average. We believe we can get this down to a small number of seconds."
From http://www.weizmann.ac.il/math/users/lbn/public_ht ml/new_pages/FAQs_3.html
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/math/users/lbn/public_ ht ml/new_pages/Press_Room.html
contains lots more information including an animation of the computer in operation.
The best way "to engage students' creativity and problem solving skills" is computer programming. Several people have suggested some very good special purpose programming languages:
Incredible Machine, Mind Rover, Lemmings (a slight stretch), LEGO Mindstorms, Rocky's Boots (and Robot Odyssey should be included here)
Someone's suggestion to try Java was called "cruel and unusual punishment" and that is probably accurate but some general purpose programming languages are appropriate:
I first encountered the singularity idea in a short story by John Campell (editor of Amazing Science Fiction).
The Last Evolution, Amazing Aug '32, John W. Campbell in Amazing Science Fiction Stories: The Wonder Years 1926-1935, ed.
Martin H. Greenberg, TSR, 1987
While I read it scores of years ago, computers designing better computers
leading to increasingly rapid "evolution" was central to the story.
If things start to get too warm we can cheaply fix it then. Edward Teller, father of
the H bomb, had some
suggestions along this line a few years ago. Essentially send up fine particles into
the upper atmosphere just like a volcano. Or maybe by then then we'll have an even simpler
more reliable solution using nanotech.
Marvin Minsky wrote
(in an introduction to a book about Logo in 1984) about why Meccano and Tinker Toys are
better than Lego bricks. His argument is based upon the fact that Lego limits the
combinatorics in ways the others don't. You want a few kinds of parts that can be combined
in lots of interesting ways. Minsky relates this to programming language design. Pretty
interesting article.
Minsky said "What evolution and genetic algorithms don't do -tell me if I'm wrong-
is keep any record of why all those poor losers died."
While I think this is largely true and a good criticism of genetic algorithms, after
listening to the book on tape The Age of Spiritual Machines - When Computers Exceed
Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil I don't think this is completely true. Kurzweil
writes about how the genes for the shape of the eye are protected by error correcting
codes and repair mechanisms to a much greater extent than the genes that control, for
example, the layout of rods and cones. Why? Because evolution has "learned" that
messing with the shape of eyes is costly and there isn't much improvement possible while
other details of eyes can be improved or adapt to changing circumstances.
Anyone who knows more about genetics want to comment on this?
It is interesting to consider what would have happened if the error was to give higher scores. Why would any school district complain? All the politicians, parents, administrators would be very pleased.
If I was running CTB I'd rather have errors that pleased my customers rather than ones that causes them to sue. A bias towards higher scores would be a good thing for my company so long as it wasn't large enough to be obvious.
I think it was Alan Kay who defined technology as that stuff that wasn't invented when you were born. Good games can and should be made with 1980s technology like Adams advocates but they should be made with 2000s technology as well as 1900s (think board games).
Consider the analogy with visual arts. Some use oil paints, some use charcoal, some user cameras, and some use computers. Within each there is plenty of room to be creative and inventive.
Let good games flourish and use or avoid whatever technology the designer chooses.
-ken kahn (www.toontalk.com)
It all depends on how computers are used
on
Kids and Computers
·
· Score: 1
The responses to Katz's posting are mostly either
Computers aren't so educational anyway.
Computers are cheap enough.
Regarding the first point: a computer isn't a thing - a computer is capable of being
literally millions of different things depending upon what software it is running. The
proponents argue that with the right software, and in the right situation, a great
learning environment can be obtained. Sure, kids have been given mediocre software and not
much exciting happened. Sure, people have been learning for thousands of years without
computers, but if they have the potential to significantly improve things then wouldn't it
be great if they were accessible to all kids? For example, read the piece by Resnick in the report.
Regarding the second point, owning a computer isn't the best way to have a good
computer learning experience. After school clubs, libraries, and yes, sometimes, even
schools, are more likely to create the community, select the right software, etc. And many
large corporations are supporting these after school computer clubs.
Marvin Minsky (the "father" of AI) wrote an excellent paper on the topic: Communication
with Alien Intelligence. In the references section he mentions a great book
(Freudenthal, Hans. LINCOS, North-Holland, 1960) written by a Dutch mathematician which is
a message for aliens. Marvin says of the book, "LINCOS drafts a detailed scenario for
communicating with aliens. He begins with elementary mathematics and shows how many other
ideas, including social ideas, might be based on that foundation. Some of Freudenthal's
constructions seem very profound."
Danny Hillis (of Connection Machine fame
and author of The
Pattern on the Stone : The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work) gave a keynote address at this
year's Game Developer Conference on this topic. He made a strong case for the idea that
computer games (in the broad sense) are now the dominant source of culture and narrative.
And that this is probably a good thing. Culture was once participatory and social - e.g.,
story telling around the camp fire but reading novels, watching theater, opera, TV and
movies is passive. Computer entertainment is interactive. It engages. And significant learning is involved.
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.
The article states, "Congress passed the CPPA in 1996 to address new problems caused by technological advances, such as the digital alteration of photographic images to create child pornography."
The author doesn't seem to appreciate the difference between altering real photos and completely synthetic imagery. And with good software there needn't be any "pornographic" files on the computer - just 3D models that software can cause to appear pornographic. The 3D models themselves might not be pornographic until altered by software. If nothing is saved to disk is this legal?
Obviously the law isn't compatible with state of the art in computer graphics systems.
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
Games - more educational than educational software
on
Trigger Happy
·
· Score: 1
Seymour Papert (cofounder of the MIT AI Lab and "father" of Logo) wrote an essay in the Game Developer Magazine called "Does Easy Do It?
Children, Games, and Learning" where he argues for how all computer games are educational. I hosted 3 roundtable discussions on this at the 1999 Game Developers Conference.
When a civilization becomes sufficiently technologically advanced to enable its members to upload themselves to computers, some (maybe a majority) will do it. And those who do, would rather think 10e39 times faster if they could. So we ought to be using our telescopes to look for these billion degree computers.
We won't have to worry about how to put these computers on our laps - we will be these computers.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
I too hope that real world construction sets never dies. As you point out there is some value in the repetition forced by re-building. But I'll argue that good virtual construction sets have many advantages.
I think debugging can be a great learning opportunity. Consider the problem solving involved in generating theories of where the bug might lie, in then finding it, and fixing it. A very general skill. And with software one can track down and fix many bugs per hour. With real world creations most of your time is spent taking things apart and putting them back together. (With LEGOs at least this is much less painful than with Erector/Mechano sets.)
I too see the value in kids doing more than moving a mouse and using a keyboard. Maybe we need to build richer interfaces to our computers.
Cliff wrote: Computer-based sets, would be a nice alternative, but nothing beats the real thing where children can use their own hands to create something they can show their paernts.
I'd like to argue with that. Software is so much more flexible and maleable than things in the real world. You build a robot arm with LEGO Technics and it doesn't work what do you do? You have to pull it apart to fix a small bug. Then you get it working and you want to add a nice little new feature. What do you do? You pull it apart to enhance it. Software is magical in that you can change it without disassembly and reassembly.
To my way of thinking there are lots of great software based construction kits and many have been mentioned in this thread (e.g. Pinball Construction Kit, ClickTeam's Klik and Play, Incredible Machine, StageCast Creator, and SimTunes) but the ones mentioned are either not universal Turing Machines or are universal only in a theoretical sense (way too awkward to do some things). (Or are professional programming languages that are really not kid-friendly.)
What gets me excited are universal construction kits. Examples of this are Squeak (and its EToys), Agentsheets, Logo, Boxer, and my ToonTalk. These are all kid-friendly program development environments. Software-based special purpose construction kits are fine, but general-purpose ones give kids access to the true power and magic of computers.
And of course kids can "show their parents" software they have built. And the parents are likely to be more impressed than a LEGO construction.
So they force the service to be taken down so AT&T or the like bids more. The creditors don't want to lose 4,000,000 times $16/month (that portion of the fees that go to Excite) but they figure this way they can pressure AT&T to up their bid.
No mistranslation or bad arithmetic.
t ml/new_pages/FAQs_3.html
_ ht ml/new_pages/Press_Room.html
"A trillion computers do a billion operations per second in 120 micro liters solution. One computer performs one operation per 1000 seconds on average. We believe we can get this down to a small number of seconds."
From http://www.weizmann.ac.il/math/users/lbn/public_h
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/math/users/lbn/public
contains lots more information including an animation of the computer in operation.
The best way "to engage students' creativity and problem solving skills" is computer programming. Several people have suggested some very good special purpose programming languages:
Incredible Machine, Mind Rover, Lemmings (a slight stretch), LEGO Mindstorms, Rocky's Boots (and Robot Odyssey should be included here)
Someone's suggestion to try Java was called "cruel and unusual punishment" and that is probably accurate but some general purpose programming languages are appropriate:
Logo is being used in a few Juvenile Detention Centers. Seymour Papert is involved in such a project.
Stagecast Creator is pretty simple and sort of general.
ToonTalk (my baby) is a general purpose programming language that looks and feels like a computer game.
Pretty funny story. Not surprisingly it was published on April 1.
I first encountered the singularity idea in a short story by John Campell (editor of Amazing Science Fiction).
The Last Evolution, Amazing Aug '32, John W. Campbell in Amazing Science Fiction Stories: The Wonder Years 1926-1935, ed. Martin H. Greenberg, TSR, 1987
While I read it scores of years ago, computers designing better computers leading to increasingly rapid "evolution" was central to the story.
If things start to get too warm we can cheaply fix it then. Edward Teller, father of the H bomb, had some suggestions along this line a few years ago. Essentially send up fine particles into the upper atmosphere just like a volcano. Or maybe by then then we'll have an even simpler more reliable solution using nanotech.
Marvin Minsky wrote (in an introduction to a book about Logo in 1984) about why Meccano and Tinker Toys are better than Lego bricks. His argument is based upon the fact that Lego limits the combinatorics in ways the others don't. You want a few kinds of parts that can be combined in lots of interesting ways. Minsky relates this to programming language design. Pretty interesting article.
Minsky said "What evolution and genetic algorithms don't do -tell me if I'm wrong- is keep any record of why all those poor losers died."
While I think this is largely true and a good criticism of genetic algorithms, after listening to the book on tape The Age of Spiritual Machines - When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil I don't think this is completely true. Kurzweil writes about how the genes for the shape of the eye are protected by error correcting codes and repair mechanisms to a much greater extent than the genes that control, for example, the layout of rods and cones. Why? Because evolution has "learned" that messing with the shape of eyes is costly and there isn't much improvement possible while other details of eyes can be improved or adapt to changing circumstances.
Anyone who knows more about genetics want to comment on this?
-ken kahn
It is interesting to consider what would have happened if the error was to give higher scores. Why would any school district complain? All the politicians, parents, administrators would be very pleased.
If I was running CTB I'd rather have errors that pleased my customers rather than ones that causes them to sue. A bias towards higher scores would be a good thing for my company so long as it wasn't large enough to be obvious.
I think it was Alan Kay who defined technology as that stuff that wasn't invented when you were born. Good games can and should be made with 1980s technology like Adams advocates but they should be made with 2000s technology as well as 1900s (think board games). Consider the analogy with visual arts. Some use oil paints, some use charcoal, some user cameras, and some use computers. Within each there is plenty of room to be creative and inventive. Let good games flourish and use or avoid whatever technology the designer chooses. -ken kahn (www.toontalk.com)
The responses to Katz's posting are mostly either
Regarding the first point: a computer isn't a thing - a computer is capable of being literally millions of different things depending upon what software it is running. The proponents argue that with the right software, and in the right situation, a great learning environment can be obtained. Sure, kids have been given mediocre software and not much exciting happened. Sure, people have been learning for thousands of years without computers, but if they have the potential to significantly improve things then wouldn't it be great if they were accessible to all kids? For example, read the piece by Resnick in the report.
Regarding the second point, owning a computer isn't the best way to have a good computer learning experience. After school clubs, libraries, and yes, sometimes, even schools, are more likely to create the community, select the right software, etc. And many large corporations are supporting these after school computer clubs.
-ken kahn
Marvin Minsky (the "father" of AI) wrote an excellent paper on the topic: Communication with Alien Intelligence. In the references section he mentions a great book (Freudenthal, Hans. LINCOS, North-Holland, 1960) written by a Dutch mathematician which is a message for aliens. Marvin says of the book, "LINCOS drafts a detailed scenario for communicating with aliens. He begins with elementary mathematics and shows how many other ideas, including social ideas, might be based on that foundation. Some of Freudenthal's constructions seem very profound."
-ken kahn
Danny Hillis (of Connection Machine fame and author of The Pattern on the Stone : The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work) gave a keynote address at this year's Game Developer Conference on this topic. He made a strong case for the idea that computer games (in the broad sense) are now the dominant source of culture and narrative. And that this is probably a good thing. Culture was once participatory and social - e.g., story telling around the camp fire but reading novels, watching theater, opera, TV and movies is passive. Computer entertainment is interactive. It engages. And significant learning is involved.
-ken kahn
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
The article states, "Congress passed the CPPA in 1996 to address new problems caused by technological advances, such as the digital alteration of photographic images to create child pornography." The author doesn't seem to appreciate the difference between altering real photos and completely synthetic imagery. And with good software there needn't be any "pornographic" files on the computer - just 3D models that software can cause to appear pornographic. The 3D models themselves might not be pornographic until altered by software. If nothing is saved to disk is this legal? Obviously the law isn't compatible with state of the art in computer graphics systems.
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:
Danny Hillis in his book "Magic in the Stone", Basic Books, 1998 writes:
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
See http://www.toontalk.com/english/eas ydo it.htm for more details.
When a civilization becomes sufficiently technologically advanced to enable its members to upload themselves to computers, some (maybe a majority) will do it. And those who do, would rather think 10e39 times faster if they could. So we ought to be using our telescopes to look for these billion degree computers. We won't have to worry about how to put these computers on our laps - we will be these computers.
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,
-ken kahn (kenkahn@toontalk.com)