I think the constructivist opportunity only works on a particular kind of person with a particular kind of computer. Alan Kay's vision is that everything shoul

I think the constructivist opportunity only works on a particular kind of person with a particular kind of computer. Alan Kay's vision is that everything should have a sort of "view source" so you can see how it was done. I had an Apple //e, back in the days when it came with a built-in BASIC interpreter and the manual, and computer mags were often filled with BASIC source listings. Which was not great, but not bad either. I assume the Romanian kids got Windows XP and there is no obvious path to hacking with that OS. You're just a consumer. But I don't think it was the machine that mattered. Plenty of my friends had the exact same computer and all they did was trade games and play them. Given a computer, I immediately decided to write programs with it. I'm just that kind of person. When I learned to play piano, I immediately tried my hand at composing. It greatly surprised me that my musical training courses were all about learning to play rather than learning to write music. I suspect the same is true of any hacker; for us, the point of learning anything is to synthesize. My point is, I think Alan Kay et al. may be crafting educational programs for ideal students, who do exist, but only as tiny fractions of the population.