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Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's Mindstorms

171 points by dannas 10y ago

anfroid555 10y ago
Understand how to make games is different then playing games and surfing the web looking at junk.
edtechdev 10y ago
Nice article, but I think you'd do many a favor by increasing the text color contrast to make it more readable: http://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://dannas.github.io/2016/08/27/review-of-seymor-paperts-mindstorms.html http://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://dannas.github.io/2016...
- jwr 10y ago
  Also, please don't disable zooming on iOS devices. There is no good reason to do it and it prevents some of us from reading at all.
  - dannas 10y ago
    Sorry for the inconvienence. I wasn't aware that the site was blocking zooming, I had just copy-pasted an old jekyll theme. I've removed the references to viewport and a scale_fix.js file, hope that helps.
    - jwr 10y ago
      Thanks! This is very much appreciated.
Whackbat 10y ago
To write good programs that provide any useful functionality often a solid understanding of architecture and Mathematics is required. These skills are better understood in my opinion without focusing on software development as the end goal. A child is likely to be self motivated to write software if they have these skills and, most importantly, a desire to do so.
- kiba 10y ago
  To write good programs that provide any useful functionality often a solid understanding of architecture and Mathematics is required. Excuse me? Mathematics? I don't recall much of my K-12 math knowledge coming to play. You need to understand architecture to write simple programs that do useful things?
  - EliRivers 10y ago
    At risk of sounding like a passive-aggressive dickhead, is that what you think mathematics is? Of course you don't think that, it was just me being a passive-aggressive dickhead, but putting aside me deserving a punch in the face, mathematics is about patterns and flow and repetition and singularities and mappings and transforms and logic and states and abstraction. Every program written is an expression of mathematical thought. Kludging around with numbers is to mathematics what paint-by-numbers is to art.
    - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
      I agree, but K12 math is not very often taught like this. It is mostly taught paint by the numbers.
    - smonff 10y ago
      Also, the way you describe mathematics can sometimes look like contemporary art (here, I think to Fluxus for example). For me saying programming is tied to maths mostly is not a good thing: you'll be a better programmer if you studied linguistics, art, sociology and gender studies around your math classes. Historically, programing has mostly been teached to science students but as we are currently talking about it, it will change maybe.
  - sophacles 10y ago
    I can't speak to your K-12 math education, but I used mine all the time. * There were always word problems. I had to take a few sentences or even a paragraph, and turn it into a representation that allowed me to get the answer. In later years this representation included variables that let me change some details and still get the right answer. Many of these had useless information included in the description, or were confusingly written, and I had to puzzle out the deeper model. This is not very different than taking a spec and making it into software. Particularly if you work directly with end users, who may include lots of unnecessary details. Sure the thing I build uses code rather than algebra equations, but that is not a huge leap - they are both mechanical rules that when applied to a problem give great, accurate answers. * Speaking of variables - just learning variables and internalizing them is pretty damn useful for coding. This is not necessarily an easy thing to internalize - tutor some kids at basic algebra sometime. The idea that X holds a value seems pretty easy to grasp, but reasoning about X being any value[0] is pretty hard to grasp (until you do, then people say "i don't know why that was hard"). * Order of operations is another thing that was super important in k-12 math. Understanding that doing things in different orders gets different results is another big concept. It also leads to other operation ordering things - like doing things in a different order may be easier, and it's ok because they are equivalent (this is a huge chung of algorithms - do the steps in a different, equivalent order, and it's less work) * Factoring in algebra and factoring in code are literally the same thing. Here is a list of variables and operations. Rearrange them into a different list of variables and operations using different functions. * Substitution and systems of equations are pretty much the same thing. If y = x + 1, I can replace any Y with (x+1) and get correct answers. In coding we call this inlining and loop unrolling. Or even just replacing $thing = func(); other_func($thing); with other_func(func()) And even more directly I was function composition (f(x), g(x), f(g(x)), f o g, etc) directly at least a couple times. * Cartesian coordinates are very helpful when doing any kind of page layout - like say HTML/CSS. * Simple set theory is useful all the time too. Heck I even use Venn diagrams (something I learned in 2nd grade) all the time. Set theory comes up obviously in databases (and other data stores) join is just a method of computing intersections. But it also comes up in other places when defining things. A huge problem when designing systems is what I call the "square/rectangle" problem - all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. This is fundamentally a set definition problem - figuring out what set we are talking about based on certain properties applies to (but is not limited to): database schema design, object hierarchy, program scope, filter creation, and so on. Looking at your comment again makes me wonder if you are questioning the Parent's semantics of "useful functionality" and "simple" vs "trivial". I'm not going to dive into that, but I will say I used many of the above concepts daily in simple shell pipelines (opening the semantic argument of what a program is, but going as broad as possible, a shell pipeline is a one off program that can be turned into a stored program by putting it in a file). I regularly want to find something in a logfile. Logs have a lot of data. Oh, I can find the subset with grep. cat log | grep thing Oh, thats a lot of data. I can need to filter more, I don't want all these lines about session validation. I guess I could make a regex. Or I could just factor that into a `grep thing|grep -v session`. Ill do that, its equivalent. This is a trivial example of using composition, substitution and set thinking. I can extend it with "thats a useful search, maybe use a variable" and so on. Can this be learned, and done without having known the stuff taught in k-12 math? Maybe I don't know, but the place I first encountered and internalized those concepts is math class. Even more controversial (from the is this a program point of view) is that these things are all useful in doing excel formulas and vba scripts. [0] I know that's not strictly true, particularly with types in a computer language. But they taught me about domains, and things like "this is true when X is not 0" and so on. This translates well to code too - checking that values are acceptable in tests and input sanitization, or conversely, finding weird values by fuzzing are all applications of domains.
mc42 10y ago
I always look at the Lego windstorms with a degree of curiosity, as their software libraries are derived from LabVIEW.
bobbylox 10y ago
If you find this essay compelling, you might be interested in the game I'm working on, Codemancer ( http://codemancergame.com/ http://codemancergame.com/ ). A game that teaches programming, with a compelling story about a girl on a journey to rescue her Father. Coming this Fall to Mac, PC and Tablets. I tried to hew closely to the principles of Constructionism which were pioneered by Papert, and to make the game accessible to kids who wouldn't normally be interested in programming.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Love the look. And female protagonist is a huge plus - I've two daughters and it amazes me just how much they really want female characters. As a boy I didn't care but perhaps I was unusual. My first question is how will this teach the use of variables and conditional logic? My daughter has been playing around with programming using Scratch and things like that. But she is stuck with just linear "programs", basically just creating animated stories. There's other games that seem to have the same mechanics as yours: get the robot from A to B by entering sequential instructions. How do you differentiate? (I mean this as a positive question not a bad criticism.) I've tried sitting down with her and doing some basics of functions, but it doesn't seem to go over well (she's 10). She _did_ love DragonBox, the algebra-instruction game. Even at 6 she was able to "solve for x" for simple equations. So I think it's possible to sneak stuff in, somehow.
  - bobbylox 10y ago
    Yes, I find that to be the case more often than not: boys don't care about the gender of their avatar. Girls do. Codemancer has variables and conditionals, and uses them for various things. Some of the game is very tactical, so conditionals are used to deal with enemies who have semi-random behaviour. There are also levels that take place "in the dark" (with a limited field of view). Yes, "code your way to the target" games have become somewhat of a genre. I think the story is one source of differentiation, as is the programming interface -- Codemancer has no numbers greater than 5 (arithmetic is mod 6), to keep the game from getting math-heavy. All the functions are symbolic, so there's no reading required. In Codemancer user-defined functions are "pages" in your spell book. Players can call other pages, and even the page they're on (this is much later in the game). You can also Cast a page onto an enemy who has been weakened. We've seen that kids are pretty comfortable with the idiom of "Pages."
pfooti 10y ago
If you liked this essay (which I did), you are probably going to be interested in Audrey Watters's Hack Education blog. [0] In particular there is a big difference between the kinds of Papert-inspired computatiinal environments that provide microworlds for learning and a lot of what is being produced today (which Watters rightly calls out as a rediscovery of Skinner behaviorism and teaching machines). She has a lot of content and a couple of essay collections. 0: http://hackeducation.com/ http://hackeducation.com/
erikpukinskis 10y ago
Preface: I'm going to use a really loose definition of AI here for a minute, which includes any computer agent that makes decisions a human might make. So, your alarm clock is an AI, the code that rejects your credit application is an AI, but the code that decides how exactly to paint this letter C is not. Now on to my comment: I think children should learn to think about programs at a young age, because understanding AIs will be equally as important as understanding other humans in the coming century. We will see more and more interaction with AIs who have powerful capabilities beyond what most humans can do. We will start to see AIs with emotional palettes and developmental trajectories that will allow them to integrate with us socially. But also, the little AIs like the alarm clock and the credit check are already more and more common gating structures in peoples' lives. As long as the majority doesn't think about programs too much, you can ignore them too. But as more and more people program, like reading it will become more and more of a disability not to. Being able to think "natively" in software is going to be important. Not mandatory, but important. Why isn't that employment AI you met finding any construction jobs for you? Does the physician AI really understand the probability that your Dad is NOT, zero probability, going to cut back his saturated fat? Your gardening AI (which is crossed with several other AIs that help you manage your household) says to plant corn, but your neighbors haven't yet, does it know something they don't? If you can read code, those are questions you can ask.
- twa927 10y ago
  I think you are severely underestimating difficulty of understanding non-trivial code. Even good programmers would need days if not weeks to understand how software like card processing AI works. And even when you understand the code behind it the AI like deep networks produce models that cannot tell to a human "how" it works. So when a person uses a software component for real-life purposes I don't think there's a difference between someone who knows how to code and someone who doesn't - it's a black box.
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    > Even good programmers would need days if not weeks to understand how software like card processing AI works I think there will be a shift in how we design software. Right now, software is mostly organized into monolithic packages which are about the maximum size a professional developer can make sense of in 40 hours per week. For the most part, all corners of the codebase are written with the expectation that they will be read by an expert in the language who understands the whole codebase. Lots of side effects, advanced control structures, etc. In order for programming literacy to take off, we will first have to start organizing some of our software for widespread human understanding. Instead of one giant pro-level repository, you will have a toplevel layer which is mostly configuration code, but which is written in very domain-relevant language, using only simple programming primitives: functions and literals. It will be boxed into small, understandable modules, and editable in a browser like any simple document. The next layer down will be generic algorithms and data structures, also written using simple programming primitives, and designed with very forgiving APIs, again using as much domain-specific language as possible and pushing non-domain specific implementation details down into libraries. The third layer will be implementation-specific code, highly optimized, using the full spectrum of language tools and programming constructs. Only the domain of professional programmers. Everyone, including children and executives will dabble in the top layer. Domain professionals (everyone in your organization who is not a full-time programmer) will work in the second layer, only in the part of the software that they specifically interact with in their work. Full-time coders will maintain the third layer, and will think of their role more as a support role, building tools to support the organization, rather than maintaining total control over the codebase.
Fiahil 10y ago
I used to play a lot with Lego when I was young, and programming is not much different from that. Given a simple manual and a set of basic pieces you learn on your own the basics, and then move to higher order constructions by experimentation. I bet you can just give a child a basic black and white terminal and a "refined documentation", and they'll be okay just as much. Just remove everything unnecessary and sandbox the whole thing (you should expect the kids to break it to install games at some point, but that's okay).
- psadri 10y ago
  Basically a Commodore 64 booting into a BASIC prompt.
- taliesinb 10y ago
  ... segue to the wonderful LEGO Mindstorms, named after Papert's book, which had a graphical programming language very similar to Squeak, which itself goes back to Kay's dynabook, influenced by Papert. OT, but I'm very grateful to Mindstorms, it took me to the next level when I was a teen, from QBasic to C. Not because of its visual block language, which I hated as I could already code, but because I found out about a thing called NQC (Not Quite C). NQC was a hobbled dialect of C that you could use instead of the LEGO's visual language to program the RCX (the main computer brick with batteries in it). I'd never tried C before, and it was a revelation. And it unlocked wondrous hacks, like using the IrDA transceiver on the RCX as a psuedo-lidar so that your robot could stop short of walls, it could even estimate distance. At the time, it was so cool to me. From playing with my stumbling robot trying not to hit obstacles I got interested in Rodney Brooks and subsumption architectures. So it just inflamed my passions in AI and programming at a critical part of my adolescence. Ironic, though, that a Papert-inspired graphical language was the antagonist in this story. The breakthrough came from wanting to scale the walls of the little garden LEGO had built.
  - erlehmann_ 10y ago
    > And it unlocked wondrous hacks, like using the IrDA transceiver on the RCX as a psuedo-lidar so that your robot could stop short of walls, it could even estimate distance. Ha, I did that as well with Mindstorms RCX in like 11th grade or so! Later, in university, Mindstorms NXT was used: Our first assignment was to follow a track on the ground and the team I was the only one had two programs, one for recording the track with the sensors and another for following the previously recorded track in high speed without using sensors at all.
vegabook 10y ago
they shouldn't. They will be subjected to a relentless digital world from age 10 onwards, and before that, they should at least be given the chance to fully bathe themselves in our intrinsically analogue reality, with all its subtle, unabstracted, and beautiful detail.
gavinpc 10y ago
Thoughtful and clearly written. I also have a six-year-old daughter and many of the same concerns. Even as a shameless Alan Kay fanboy, I'd managed to miss his 2007 TED talk until last night. It includes a kind of front-to-back demo of how they were using computers (and other means) to teach six-year-olds at that time, which I haven't seen in his longer talks for technical audiences. https://archive.org/details/AlanKay_2007 https://archive.org/details/AlanKay_2007
- e12e 10y ago
  Also related, Alan Kay's talk on "Rethinking CS education (2015)": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N9c7_8Gp7gI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N9c7_8Gp7gI
todd8 10y ago
At my age I can barely read the article's thin, small, low-contrast font, but I believe that I agree with the author. I read Mindstorms back when it was first published and thought it was reasonable. Now, I'm more skeptical. I see the early introduction of technology into schools as distractions. I have the benefit of experiencing life before the impact of computers on society. Heck, my parents wouldn't even let me get toys that required batteries (too expensive to replace). So, I played with toy trucks and I read and I climbed trees and I drew. I drew pictures of locks, of circuits, of mazes, of buildings. My own children grew up very differently. Playing video games, and their schools insisted on early introduction of laptops, convertible laptop/tablets, and iPads. At an age where I would be drawing complicated diagrams of electrical relays to play tick-tack-toe (which, because I was just a 13 year old kid with no training would have never worked) they played XBox. I tried to get the schools to use paper and pencil for math lessons instead of iPads, but the forces at work in school systems end up encouraging many distracting technologies being introduced with no discernible benefit. Furthermore, the development of abstract thinking, necessary for programming, happens over time in children. Is there any evidence that early programming instruction hastens it's development? Real research in education seems pretty weak.
- sneak 10y ago
  Perhaps the false dichotomy of electrical/paper is obscuring the very real one of video games/not video games. Playing XBox is a waste of time in any generation.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - todd8 10y ago
    I think you're right. I didn't mean to make the implication that the problem was electrical vs paper. I eventually did get old enough to go to the hardware store to buy bell wire, knife switches and bulbs for my early experiments. I wish my kids had grow up more interested in building things. I feel like I failed in this. With respect to using paper and pencil for math there is still no contest between doing math on paper and doing it with your finger on an iPad.
nojvek 10y ago
This hits home. Lego mind storms is what made me get into programming. I had so much fun tinkering with both the hardware and software. Although labview based software was utter crap. There was an open source C based version. That was my first building blocks. I'm thinking of getting my nephew one.
behnamoh 10y ago
I think schools should teach only functional programming, because it's much more challenging and better suits the purpose of educating the students. When it comes to FP, I suggest Haskell without second thought, because it's pure and forces children to think functionally. Haskell's clean syntax also makes it easier for children to read and write code. On a side note, Haskell also resembles much of mathematical notations kids learn in school anyway, more so than any other language (guards, functions, etc.) Teaching it would not only help kids with programming, but also would serve as a tool to implement math lessons on a computer.
- taeric 10y ago
  Contrast this with the tinkering view that students should be given devices that do things. Often described in very imperative languages. It is not shocking that many actually find imperative easier to get things done in. This is not to say that I think functional is bad. But blind advocacy that ignores how you got to the spot you are is not helpful in getting others to the same spot.
  - behnamoh 10y ago
    Certainly imperative-style also has its own advantages, and I'm not saying FP is better or anything. You might be right about the tinkering view, and to be honest, I know that sometimes procedural thinking is a must-have ability that kids should posses. But then again, programming is not just coding, and kids getting used to imperative-style would probably miss the whole point, which is finding challenge. Anyway, you know how hard it is for a person who is used to imperative to get it out of his system and program functionally. I have found the other way around much easier. Just a thought.
    - taeric 10y ago
      Why not both? Progress is usually the important part. Offering both is expensive; but going all in on a single approach is dangerous in the failure case.
kpwagner 10y ago
His conclusion, to "not try to make programmers out of kids, but rather enable kids to be makers", seems like the right idea. "Hacky coding", which would be an accurate description for the programming I've done outside of front-end dev, is comparable to "making". Making is more about creativity and trying than syntax and optimization. It's not about encouraging mediocrity; it's about saying there's nothing wrong with failing.
twa927 10y ago
I think programming is for adults. Programming abstractions we use and ways of thinking are tailored to an adult's brain. I think that "programming" environments for children are SOMETHING DIFFERENT than real-world's programming. I don't see how what you learn in the former translates to the latter. I remember actually not liking programming when introduced in a school. They didn't teach abstractions like functions, data types but rather long, math-oriented series of instructions which needed visualizing in a notebook to understand (I think environments like MIT's Scratch are something similar). I only started to love programming when I saw it consists mainly of things like functions, objects, different data types. But this kind of things is probably too abstract for a kid to understand.
tdkl 10y ago
> And when I watch her friends using the tablet in kindergarten, I see educational apps that introduces numbers, letters and simple logic. But couldn’t those subjects have been taught just as well without a computer? Of course they could, but corporations couldn't earn millions in this case.
- jdminhbg 10y ago
  No, people are very capable of earning millions by selling non-computerized educational materials. See the textbook industry for an example.
endswapper 10y ago
I think children should program, and I think they should do it as early as possible. It's a form of mental calisthenics that when coupled with the right parent/mentor will prove invaluable in development and beyond. In the same way that child gymnasts(or insert appropriate example) get the benefits of developing physical strength and range of motion I think child programmers can reap mental benefits. I think most education is focused on data accumulation as opposed versatility. Usually, it is when you get to some level of advanced education that it starts to teach you how to think. I think that is backwards, but perhaps a different conversation. For example, my lawyer friends are quite proud that their law degree "taught them how to think." What I find most exhilarating (yes, exhilarating) about programming is the problem solving aspect, which forces you to think differently. Finding comfort in patterns has a certain pleasantness to it, however, my experience is that you will eventually run in to situations that challenge your experience and expectations. For me, that's not just a benefit of programming, but a metaphor for life. The more modes of thinking, or perspectives you possess the better you understand yourself, how you think, your strengths and weaknesses. Then you can hack yourself to improve or leverage each.
kasparsklavins 10y ago
I teach kids low level programming. It can be quite rewarding.
conceptpad 10y ago
"Learning from Seymour Papert" - MIT Media Lab Published on Aug 1, 2016 A panel from the Spring 2014 Member Event. Panelists: Mitch Resnick, Marvin Minsky, Alan Kay, and Nicholas Negroponte. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvgef9ABDUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvgef9ABDUc
nicolethenerd 10y ago
This is a bit of a tangent, but you guys seem like the right crowd. Logo has been on my mind the past few days, as I'm rapidly approaching my 20th "codeversary" (ie. 20 years since my very first programming lesson, in what I believe was Berkeley Logo). To mark the occasion, I've been trying to figure out what a Logo tribute tattoo might look like - the "turtle" is the obvious thing that comes to mind, but in the version of Logo I learned on, the "turtle" was just a triangle. I'm trying to come up with an image that's aesthetically pleasing, doesn't actually include any code, and is recognizable as Logo. So maybe the "turtle" drawing something, but what? (No idea whether I'll actually muster the courage to get this inked on my body, but it's a fun thought exercise either way.) Any ideas?
- sn9 10y ago
  The obvious solution to me is an image of a turtle in the process of being drawn by a Logo triangle. You'd want it to be incomplete, but complete enough to have transformed from an arrangement of lines to something that's unambiguously a turtle.
  - nicolethenerd 10y ago
    Thanks! Or a turtle being drawn by a turtle being drawn by a turtle... turtles all the way down! ^_^ Seriously, though - I appreciate the suggestion - I was thinking of triangles drawing triangles, and turtles drawing turtles - but it didn't occur to me to mix the two. Great idea!
    - Intermernet 10y ago
      > triangles drawing triangles Reminds me of a Sierpinski triangle[1]. Can you have a turtle infilled with the Sierpinski pattern, or maybe a Sierpinski triangle being drawn by a turtle? Also, you could get a tattoo with something like: to e :s :l if :l>0[repeat 3[e :s/2 :l-1 fd :s rt 120]] end e 99 5 Which is Logo code to draw a Sierpinski triangle (main credit [2], you can demo at [3]). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_triangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_triangle [2]: http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/10793 http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/10793 [3]: http://www.calormen.com/jslogo/ http://www.calormen.com/jslogo/

171 points by dannas 10y ago

Understand how to make games is different then playing games and surfing the web looking at junk.

Nice article, but I think you'd do many a favor by increasing the text color contrast to make it more readable: http://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://dannas.github.io/2016/08/27/review-of-seymor-paperts-mindstorms.html http://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://dannas.github.io/2016...

jwr 10y ago
Also, please don't disable zooming on iOS devices. There is no good reason to do it and it prevents some of us from reading at all.
- dannas 10y ago
  Sorry for the inconvienence. I wasn't aware that the site was blocking zooming, I had just copy-pasted an old jekyll theme. I've removed the references to viewport and a scale_fix.js file, hope that helps.
  - jwr 10y ago
    Thanks! This is very much appreciated.

Whackbat 10y ago

To write good programs that provide any useful functionality often a solid understanding of architecture and Mathematics is required. These skills are better understood in my opinion without focusing on software development as the end goal. A child is likely to be self motivated to write software if they have these skills and, most importantly, a desire to do so.

kiba 10y ago
To write good programs that provide any useful functionality often a solid understanding of architecture and Mathematics is required. Excuse me? Mathematics? I don't recall much of my K-12 math knowledge coming to play. You need to understand architecture to write simple programs that do useful things?
- EliRivers 10y ago
  At risk of sounding like a passive-aggressive dickhead, is that what you think mathematics is? Of course you don't think that, it was just me being a passive-aggressive dickhead, but putting aside me deserving a punch in the face, mathematics is about patterns and flow and repetition and singularities and mappings and transforms and logic and states and abstraction. Every program written is an expression of mathematical thought. Kludging around with numbers is to mathematics what paint-by-numbers is to art.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    I agree, but K12 math is not very often taught like this. It is mostly taught paint by the numbers.
  - smonff 10y ago
    Also, the way you describe mathematics can sometimes look like contemporary art (here, I think to Fluxus for example). For me saying programming is tied to maths mostly is not a good thing: you'll be a better programmer if you studied linguistics, art, sociology and gender studies around your math classes. Historically, programing has mostly been teached to science students but as we are currently talking about it, it will change maybe.
- sophacles 10y ago
  I can't speak to your K-12 math education, but I used mine all the time. * There were always word problems. I had to take a few sentences or even a paragraph, and turn it into a representation that allowed me to get the answer. In later years this representation included variables that let me change some details and still get the right answer. Many of these had useless information included in the description, or were confusingly written, and I had to puzzle out the deeper model. This is not very different than taking a spec and making it into software. Particularly if you work directly with end users, who may include lots of unnecessary details. Sure the thing I build uses code rather than algebra equations, but that is not a huge leap - they are both mechanical rules that when applied to a problem give great, accurate answers. * Speaking of variables - just learning variables and internalizing them is pretty damn useful for coding. This is not necessarily an easy thing to internalize - tutor some kids at basic algebra sometime. The idea that X holds a value seems pretty easy to grasp, but reasoning about X being any value[0] is pretty hard to grasp (until you do, then people say "i don't know why that was hard"). * Order of operations is another thing that was super important in k-12 math. Understanding that doing things in different orders gets different results is another big concept. It also leads to other operation ordering things - like doing things in a different order may be easier, and it's ok because they are equivalent (this is a huge chung of algorithms - do the steps in a different, equivalent order, and it's less work) * Factoring in algebra and factoring in code are literally the same thing. Here is a list of variables and operations. Rearrange them into a different list of variables and operations using different functions. * Substitution and systems of equations are pretty much the same thing. If y = x + 1, I can replace any Y with (x+1) and get correct answers. In coding we call this inlining and loop unrolling. Or even just replacing $thing = func(); other_func($thing); with other_func(func()) And even more directly I was function composition (f(x), g(x), f(g(x)), f o g, etc) directly at least a couple times. * Cartesian coordinates are very helpful when doing any kind of page layout - like say HTML/CSS. * Simple set theory is useful all the time too. Heck I even use Venn diagrams (something I learned in 2nd grade) all the time. Set theory comes up obviously in databases (and other data stores) join is just a method of computing intersections. But it also comes up in other places when defining things. A huge problem when designing systems is what I call the "square/rectangle" problem - all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. This is fundamentally a set definition problem - figuring out what set we are talking about based on certain properties applies to (but is not limited to): database schema design, object hierarchy, program scope, filter creation, and so on. Looking at your comment again makes me wonder if you are questioning the Parent's semantics of "useful functionality" and "simple" vs "trivial". I'm not going to dive into that, but I will say I used many of the above concepts daily in simple shell pipelines (opening the semantic argument of what a program is, but going as broad as possible, a shell pipeline is a one off program that can be turned into a stored program by putting it in a file). I regularly want to find something in a logfile. Logs have a lot of data. Oh, I can find the subset with grep. cat log | grep thing Oh, thats a lot of data. I can need to filter more, I don't want all these lines about session validation. I guess I could make a regex. Or I could just factor that into a `grep thing|grep -v session`. Ill do that, its equivalent. This is a trivial example of using composition, substitution and set thinking. I can extend it with "thats a useful search, maybe use a variable" and so on. Can this be learned, and done without having known the stuff taught in k-12 math? Maybe I don't know, but the place I first encountered and internalized those concepts is math class. Even more controversial (from the is this a program point of view) is that these things are all useful in doing excel formulas and vba scripts. [0] I know that's not strictly true, particularly with types in a computer language. But they taught me about domains, and things like "this is true when X is not 0" and so on. This translates well to code too - checking that values are acceptable in tests and input sanitization, or conversely, finding weird values by fuzzing are all applications of domains.

mc42 10y ago

I always look at the Lego windstorms with a degree of curiosity, as their software libraries are derived from LabVIEW.

bobbylox 10y ago

If you find this essay compelling, you might be interested in the game I'm working on, Codemancer ( http://codemancergame.com/ http://codemancergame.com/ ). A game that teaches programming, with a compelling story about a girl on a journey to rescue her Father. Coming this Fall to Mac, PC and Tablets. I tried to hew closely to the principles of Constructionism which were pioneered by Papert, and to make the game accessible to kids who wouldn't normally be interested in programming.

MichaelGG 10y ago
Love the look. And female protagonist is a huge plus - I've two daughters and it amazes me just how much they really want female characters. As a boy I didn't care but perhaps I was unusual. My first question is how will this teach the use of variables and conditional logic? My daughter has been playing around with programming using Scratch and things like that. But she is stuck with just linear "programs", basically just creating animated stories. There's other games that seem to have the same mechanics as yours: get the robot from A to B by entering sequential instructions. How do you differentiate? (I mean this as a positive question not a bad criticism.) I've tried sitting down with her and doing some basics of functions, but it doesn't seem to go over well (she's 10). She _did_ love DragonBox, the algebra-instruction game. Even at 6 she was able to "solve for x" for simple equations. So I think it's possible to sneak stuff in, somehow.
- bobbylox 10y ago
  Yes, I find that to be the case more often than not: boys don't care about the gender of their avatar. Girls do. Codemancer has variables and conditionals, and uses them for various things. Some of the game is very tactical, so conditionals are used to deal with enemies who have semi-random behaviour. There are also levels that take place "in the dark" (with a limited field of view). Yes, "code your way to the target" games have become somewhat of a genre. I think the story is one source of differentiation, as is the programming interface -- Codemancer has no numbers greater than 5 (arithmetic is mod 6), to keep the game from getting math-heavy. All the functions are symbolic, so there's no reading required. In Codemancer user-defined functions are "pages" in your spell book. Players can call other pages, and even the page they're on (this is much later in the game). You can also Cast a page onto an enemy who has been weakened. We've seen that kids are pretty comfortable with the idiom of "Pages."

pfooti 10y ago

If you liked this essay (which I did), you are probably going to be interested in Audrey Watters's Hack Education blog. [0] In particular there is a big difference between the kinds of Papert-inspired computatiinal environments that provide microworlds for learning and a lot of what is being produced today (which Watters rightly calls out as a rediscovery of Skinner behaviorism and teaching machines). She has a lot of content and a couple of essay collections. 0: http://hackeducation.com/ http://hackeducation.com/

erikpukinskis 10y ago

Preface: I'm going to use a really loose definition of AI here for a minute, which includes any computer agent that makes decisions a human might make. So, your alarm clock is an AI, the code that rejects your credit application is an AI, but the code that decides how exactly to paint this letter C is not. Now on to my comment: I think children should learn to think about programs at a young age, because understanding AIs will be equally as important as understanding other humans in the coming century. We will see more and more interaction with AIs who have powerful capabilities beyond what most humans can do. We will start to see AIs with emotional palettes and developmental trajectories that will allow them to integrate with us socially. But also, the little AIs like the alarm clock and the credit check are already more and more common gating structures in peoples' lives. As long as the majority doesn't think about programs too much, you can ignore them too. But as more and more people program, like reading it will become more and more of a disability not to. Being able to think "natively" in software is going to be important. Not mandatory, but important. Why isn't that employment AI you met finding any construction jobs for you? Does the physician AI really understand the probability that your Dad is NOT, zero probability, going to cut back his saturated fat? Your gardening AI (which is crossed with several other AIs that help you manage your household) says to plant corn, but your neighbors haven't yet, does it know something they don't? If you can read code, those are questions you can ask.

twa927 10y ago
I think you are severely underestimating difficulty of understanding non-trivial code. Even good programmers would need days if not weeks to understand how software like card processing AI works. And even when you understand the code behind it the AI like deep networks produce models that cannot tell to a human "how" it works. So when a person uses a software component for real-life purposes I don't think there's a difference between someone who knows how to code and someone who doesn't - it's a black box.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  > Even good programmers would need days if not weeks to understand how software like card processing AI works I think there will be a shift in how we design software. Right now, software is mostly organized into monolithic packages which are about the maximum size a professional developer can make sense of in 40 hours per week. For the most part, all corners of the codebase are written with the expectation that they will be read by an expert in the language who understands the whole codebase. Lots of side effects, advanced control structures, etc. In order for programming literacy to take off, we will first have to start organizing some of our software for widespread human understanding. Instead of one giant pro-level repository, you will have a toplevel layer which is mostly configuration code, but which is written in very domain-relevant language, using only simple programming primitives: functions and literals. It will be boxed into small, understandable modules, and editable in a browser like any simple document. The next layer down will be generic algorithms and data structures, also written using simple programming primitives, and designed with very forgiving APIs, again using as much domain-specific language as possible and pushing non-domain specific implementation details down into libraries. The third layer will be implementation-specific code, highly optimized, using the full spectrum of language tools and programming constructs. Only the domain of professional programmers. Everyone, including children and executives will dabble in the top layer. Domain professionals (everyone in your organization who is not a full-time programmer) will work in the second layer, only in the part of the software that they specifically interact with in their work. Full-time coders will maintain the third layer, and will think of their role more as a support role, building tools to support the organization, rather than maintaining total control over the codebase.

Fiahil 10y ago

I used to play a lot with Lego when I was young, and programming is not much different from that. Given a simple manual and a set of basic pieces you learn on your own the basics, and then move to higher order constructions by experimentation. I bet you can just give a child a basic black and white terminal and a "refined documentation", and they'll be okay just as much. Just remove everything unnecessary and sandbox the whole thing (you should expect the kids to break it to install games at some point, but that's okay).

psadri 10y ago
Basically a Commodore 64 booting into a BASIC prompt.
taliesinb 10y ago
... segue to the wonderful LEGO Mindstorms, named after Papert's book, which had a graphical programming language very similar to Squeak, which itself goes back to Kay's dynabook, influenced by Papert. OT, but I'm very grateful to Mindstorms, it took me to the next level when I was a teen, from QBasic to C. Not because of its visual block language, which I hated as I could already code, but because I found out about a thing called NQC (Not Quite C). NQC was a hobbled dialect of C that you could use instead of the LEGO's visual language to program the RCX (the main computer brick with batteries in it). I'd never tried C before, and it was a revelation. And it unlocked wondrous hacks, like using the IrDA transceiver on the RCX as a psuedo-lidar so that your robot could stop short of walls, it could even estimate distance. At the time, it was so cool to me. From playing with my stumbling robot trying not to hit obstacles I got interested in Rodney Brooks and subsumption architectures. So it just inflamed my passions in AI and programming at a critical part of my adolescence. Ironic, though, that a Papert-inspired graphical language was the antagonist in this story. The breakthrough came from wanting to scale the walls of the little garden LEGO had built.
- erlehmann_ 10y ago
  > And it unlocked wondrous hacks, like using the IrDA transceiver on the RCX as a psuedo-lidar so that your robot could stop short of walls, it could even estimate distance. Ha, I did that as well with Mindstorms RCX in like 11th grade or so! Later, in university, Mindstorms NXT was used: Our first assignment was to follow a track on the ground and the team I was the only one had two programs, one for recording the track with the sensors and another for following the previously recorded track in high speed without using sensors at all.

vegabook 10y ago

they shouldn't. They will be subjected to a relentless digital world from age 10 onwards, and before that, they should at least be given the chance to fully bathe themselves in our intrinsically analogue reality, with all its subtle, unabstracted, and beautiful detail.

gavinpc 10y ago

Thoughtful and clearly written. I also have a six-year-old daughter and many of the same concerns. Even as a shameless Alan Kay fanboy, I'd managed to miss his 2007 TED talk until last night. It includes a kind of front-to-back demo of how they were using computers (and other means) to teach six-year-olds at that time, which I haven't seen in his longer talks for technical audiences. https://archive.org/details/AlanKay_2007 https://archive.org/details/AlanKay_2007

e12e 10y ago
Also related, Alan Kay's talk on "Rethinking CS education (2015)": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N9c7_8Gp7gI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N9c7_8Gp7gI

todd8 10y ago

At my age I can barely read the article's thin, small, low-contrast font, but I believe that I agree with the author. I read Mindstorms back when it was first published and thought it was reasonable. Now, I'm more skeptical. I see the early introduction of technology into schools as distractions. I have the benefit of experiencing life before the impact of computers on society. Heck, my parents wouldn't even let me get toys that required batteries (too expensive to replace). So, I played with toy trucks and I read and I climbed trees and I drew. I drew pictures of locks, of circuits, of mazes, of buildings. My own children grew up very differently. Playing video games, and their schools insisted on early introduction of laptops, convertible laptop/tablets, and iPads. At an age where I would be drawing complicated diagrams of electrical relays to play tick-tack-toe (which, because I was just a 13 year old kid with no training would have never worked) they played XBox. I tried to get the schools to use paper and pencil for math lessons instead of iPads, but the forces at work in school systems end up encouraging many distracting technologies being introduced with no discernible benefit. Furthermore, the development of abstract thinking, necessary for programming, happens over time in children. Is there any evidence that early programming instruction hastens it's development? Real research in education seems pretty weak.

sneak 10y ago
Perhaps the false dichotomy of electrical/paper is obscuring the very real one of video games/not video games. Playing XBox is a waste of time in any generation.
- deleted 10y ago
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- todd8 10y ago
  I think you're right. I didn't mean to make the implication that the problem was electrical vs paper. I eventually did get old enough to go to the hardware store to buy bell wire, knife switches and bulbs for my early experiments. I wish my kids had grow up more interested in building things. I feel like I failed in this. With respect to using paper and pencil for math there is still no contest between doing math on paper and doing it with your finger on an iPad.

nojvek 10y ago

This hits home. Lego mind storms is what made me get into programming. I had so much fun tinkering with both the hardware and software. Although labview based software was utter crap. There was an open source C based version. That was my first building blocks. I'm thinking of getting my nephew one.

behnamoh 10y ago

I think schools should teach only functional programming, because it's much more challenging and better suits the purpose of educating the students. When it comes to FP, I suggest Haskell without second thought, because it's pure and forces children to think functionally. Haskell's clean syntax also makes it easier for children to read and write code. On a side note, Haskell also resembles much of mathematical notations kids learn in school anyway, more so than any other language (guards, functions, etc.) Teaching it would not only help kids with programming, but also would serve as a tool to implement math lessons on a computer.

taeric 10y ago
Contrast this with the tinkering view that students should be given devices that do things. Often described in very imperative languages. It is not shocking that many actually find imperative easier to get things done in. This is not to say that I think functional is bad. But blind advocacy that ignores how you got to the spot you are is not helpful in getting others to the same spot.
- behnamoh 10y ago
  Certainly imperative-style also has its own advantages, and I'm not saying FP is better or anything. You might be right about the tinkering view, and to be honest, I know that sometimes procedural thinking is a must-have ability that kids should posses. But then again, programming is not just coding, and kids getting used to imperative-style would probably miss the whole point, which is finding challenge. Anyway, you know how hard it is for a person who is used to imperative to get it out of his system and program functionally. I have found the other way around much easier. Just a thought.
  - taeric 10y ago
    Why not both? Progress is usually the important part. Offering both is expensive; but going all in on a single approach is dangerous in the failure case.

kpwagner 10y ago

His conclusion, to "not try to make programmers out of kids, but rather enable kids to be makers", seems like the right idea. "Hacky coding", which would be an accurate description for the programming I've done outside of front-end dev, is comparable to "making". Making is more about creativity and trying than syntax and optimization. It's not about encouraging mediocrity; it's about saying there's nothing wrong with failing.

twa927 10y ago

I think programming is for adults. Programming abstractions we use and ways of thinking are tailored to an adult's brain. I think that "programming" environments for children are SOMETHING DIFFERENT than real-world's programming. I don't see how what you learn in the former translates to the latter. I remember actually not liking programming when introduced in a school. They didn't teach abstractions like functions, data types but rather long, math-oriented series of instructions which needed visualizing in a notebook to understand (I think environments like MIT's Scratch are something similar). I only started to love programming when I saw it consists mainly of things like functions, objects, different data types. But this kind of things is probably too abstract for a kid to understand.

tdkl 10y ago

> And when I watch her friends using the tablet in kindergarten, I see educational apps that introduces numbers, letters and simple logic. But couldn’t those subjects have been taught just as well without a computer? Of course they could, but corporations couldn't earn millions in this case.

jdminhbg 10y ago
No, people are very capable of earning millions by selling non-computerized educational materials. See the textbook industry for an example.

endswapper 10y ago

I think children should program, and I think they should do it as early as possible. It's a form of mental calisthenics that when coupled with the right parent/mentor will prove invaluable in development and beyond. In the same way that child gymnasts(or insert appropriate example) get the benefits of developing physical strength and range of motion I think child programmers can reap mental benefits. I think most education is focused on data accumulation as opposed versatility. Usually, it is when you get to some level of advanced education that it starts to teach you how to think. I think that is backwards, but perhaps a different conversation. For example, my lawyer friends are quite proud that their law degree "taught them how to think." What I find most exhilarating (yes, exhilarating) about programming is the problem solving aspect, which forces you to think differently. Finding comfort in patterns has a certain pleasantness to it, however, my experience is that you will eventually run in to situations that challenge your experience and expectations. For me, that's not just a benefit of programming, but a metaphor for life. The more modes of thinking, or perspectives you possess the better you understand yourself, how you think, your strengths and weaknesses. Then you can hack yourself to improve or leverage each.

kasparsklavins 10y ago

I teach kids low level programming. It can be quite rewarding.

conceptpad 10y ago

"Learning from Seymour Papert" - MIT Media Lab Published on Aug 1, 2016 A panel from the Spring 2014 Member Event. Panelists: Mitch Resnick, Marvin Minsky, Alan Kay, and Nicholas Negroponte. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvgef9ABDUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvgef9ABDUc

nicolethenerd 10y ago

This is a bit of a tangent, but you guys seem like the right crowd. Logo has been on my mind the past few days, as I'm rapidly approaching my 20th "codeversary" (ie. 20 years since my very first programming lesson, in what I believe was Berkeley Logo). To mark the occasion, I've been trying to figure out what a Logo tribute tattoo might look like - the "turtle" is the obvious thing that comes to mind, but in the version of Logo I learned on, the "turtle" was just a triangle. I'm trying to come up with an image that's aesthetically pleasing, doesn't actually include any code, and is recognizable as Logo. So maybe the "turtle" drawing something, but what? (No idea whether I'll actually muster the courage to get this inked on my body, but it's a fun thought exercise either way.) Any ideas?

sn9 10y ago
The obvious solution to me is an image of a turtle in the process of being drawn by a Logo triangle. You'd want it to be incomplete, but complete enough to have transformed from an arrangement of lines to something that's unambiguously a turtle.
- nicolethenerd 10y ago
  Thanks! Or a turtle being drawn by a turtle being drawn by a turtle... turtles all the way down! ^_^ Seriously, though - I appreciate the suggestion - I was thinking of triangles drawing triangles, and turtles drawing turtles - but it didn't occur to me to mix the two. Great idea!
  - Intermernet 10y ago
    > triangles drawing triangles Reminds me of a Sierpinski triangle[1]. Can you have a turtle infilled with the Sierpinski pattern, or maybe a Sierpinski triangle being drawn by a turtle? Also, you could get a tattoo with something like: to e :s :l if :l>0[repeat 3[e :s/2 :l-1 fd :s rt 120]] end e 99 5 Which is Logo code to draw a Sierpinski triangle (main credit [2], you can demo at [3]). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_triangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_triangle [2]: http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/10793 http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/10793 [3]: http://www.calormen.com/jslogo/ http://www.calormen.com/jslogo/