First, OMG, thank you for all this information. I'm super interested in this field and spend all my time thinking about it and applying these ideas in practice

First, OMG, thank you for all this information. I'm super interested in this field and spend all my time thinking about it and applying these ideas in practice as the co-founder of http://devbootcamp.com http://devbootcamp.com Second, everything you said is true and doesn't surprise me. I admit my ignorance. I disagree WRT Bret, though. He's playing a clever game and I think his success is a directly result of that. Ironically, that game is nothing more than practicing what he preaches. He applies these principles and ideas at every layer, including the meta-layer where the problem is not "help people build models around computation" but "help people build models around how to build models around computation." Put another way, Bret's essays and presentations are themselves applications of these ideas. They practice what they preach. "Learnable Programming," for example, is both a critique of Khan Academy's approach and a itself for the better approach he's advocating. Bret is giving me many representations of the idea he is trying to express around how people learn: symbolic, visual, and structural. What I'm learning, though, is not how to program, but how to teach people how to program. I'm going to read http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/ch-phd.pdf http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/ch-phd.pdf for sure, but let's be honest: a 121-page PhD thesis about real-time programming and computational literacy isn't practicing what it's preaching. :) Or maybe "show, don't tell" is a better way to put it? This field is all about teaching and communication, right? It's about giving people the tools and models they need to explore their environment, get feedback from it, learn, and build, assimilate, and synthesize new models. So, what more is there than being a "great communicator," at that point?