I attended middleschool and highschool in Maine. Those laptops are one of the reasons I ended up enjoying programming so much. In middleschool, when the laptop

I attended middleschool and highschool in Maine. Those laptops are one of the reasons I ended up enjoying programming so much. In middleschool, when the laptop program first rolled out, we were so excited to try the sleek new machines. I have distinct memories of asking a relative for an AppleScript book as a present. We would make simple "MadLibs" scripts with text-to-speech, scripts to animate windows and draw ASCII art in accordance with user commands, and even fake "viruses". We also attempted to use Xcode, but only got as far as making toy web browsers with the default UI toolkit. Keynote was an amazing program because it allowed us to create full games using tens to hundreds of slides. These were mostly point-and-click, but we did attempt some fast moving action games. By fast moving, I mean a few frames per second. I also remember using Keynote to make a presentation about the Fukushima Daiichi disaster; it had an animated reactor, and interactive buttons to show what would happen with certain water levels, and so on. When we switched to Windows in highschool, the computers temporarily lost some of their magic and we ended up playing Halo during lunch. Very soon we discovered Scratch[0] and Phun[1], and we were back at it again creating even better games, or sketching and dreaming up physics simulations on the bus ride home. One of the greatest benefits of these programs - I'm not sure if this is still the case - is that we could take the laptops home over summer break. This lead to many late nights of programming while putting off those summer essays. Sometimes we could use online textbooks for a class, but most classes forced us to carry around heavy textbooks, so we ended up painfully lugging bags containing a laptop and 2+ textbooks between classes. I haven't mentioned class much, but we used them for news, for studying language, for creating music, and for math. Above all, we used them as an outlet for our curiosity, and that was their greatest strength at the time. Now I understand many students receive iPads. [0] https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/ [1] http://www.algodoo.com/download/ http://www.algodoo.com/download/