Just read Alan Kay’s Early History of Smalltalk. It was timely for me because Brian Marick’s mention of the New Math put me in auto-rant mode on how schools optimize for students who are unlikely to excel in the subjects they are being taught.

One of the themes of Alan Kay’s sparkling career has been to try to make computers accessible to children as a learning tool and his history is full of little anecdotes about how he would teach Smalltalk to twelve year-olds and they would spontaneously invent stuff.

What was so wonderful about this idea were the myriad of children’s projects that could spring off the humble boxes. And some of the earliest were tools! This was when we got really excited. For example, Marion Goldeen’s (12 yrs old) painting system was a full-fledged tool. A few yuears later, so was Susan Hamet’s (12 yrs old) OOP illustration system (with a design that was like the MacDraw to come). Two more were Bruce Horn’s (15 yrs old) music score capture system and Steve Ptz’s (15 yrs old) circuit design system. Looking back, this could be called another example in computer science of the “early success syndrome.”

I get the impression though that Kay thought of this as a failure as he was looking to revolutionize education as a whole rather than train the next generation of super-geniuses (like himself).

The successes were real, but they weren’t as general as we thought. They wouldn’t extend into the future as stringly as we hoped. The children were chosen from the Palo Alto schools (hardly an average background) and we tended to be much more excited about the successes than the difficulties. In part, that we were seeing was the “hack phenomenon,” that, for any given pursuit, a particular 5% of the population will jump into it naturally, while the 80% or so who can learn it in time do not find it at all natural.

I wonder how he feels now when he looks back?

He, along with his team at Parc, invented a huge chunk of the technology that has made modern computing successful.  But computers have still not had much impact on the way kids are taught. When they are not used as glorified textbooks, they are used to teach PowerPoint skills and word-processing.

I wonder if he would have had more success if he had optimized for the kids who are excited about computers? The sweet spot for his glorious Squeak still seems to be kids who find joy in creating and exploring. I wonder what would have happened if he had stuck with that 5% who jumped in naturally instead of trying to satisfy a broader audience? (If someone runs into him, can you ask him for me?)

The rest of Kay’s paper is well worth a read. It’s inspirational despite its underlying theme of if only they had listened to us. He was telling his bosses at Xerox in 1971 that

In the 1990’s there will be millions of personal computers. They will be the size of notebooks of today, have high-resolution flat-screen reflective display.s, wigh less than ten pounds, have ten to twenty times the computing and storage capacity of an Alto. Let’s call them Dynabooks.

The purchase price will be about that of a color television set of the era, although most of the machines will be given away by manufacturers who will be marketing the content rather than the container of personal computing.

He talks a lot about education and about constructionist ideas and about how schools didn’t teach real world skills.

The general topic was education and it was the first time I heard Marvin Minsky speak. He put forth a terrific diatribe against traditional education methods, and from him I heard the ideas of Piaget and Papert for the first time. Marvin’s talk was about how we think about complex situations and why schools are really bad places to learn these skills. He didn’t have to make any claims about computer+kids to make his point. It was clear that education and learning had to be rethought in the light of 20th century cognitive psychology and how good thinkers really think.

He ends on a sad note

When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous disatisfaction with one’s designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the disatisfaction from self worth–otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results.

Not sure whether he is advocating that we compare our efforts with the entire history of human art and become inevitably dissatisfied or to go ahead and compare and be happy anyway.

Richard Dawkins doing what he does best - talking about science - to Lawrence Krauss at Stanford.

It’s in six parts. You can see the rest here.

In which Paul Graham discovers that the essays they teach you to write in school are completely unlike the essays you might want to write in real life.

Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” (the cousin of our word assay), and an “essai” is an effort. An essay is something you write in order to figure something out.

Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You see a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.

If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne’s great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. 90% of what ends up in my essays was stuff I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.

The gist of his argument is that the roots of our education system lie in two endeavors

1. Training medieval lawyers to argue a position
2. Attempting to rediscover the wisdom of the ancients

and that, while those pursuits were relevant 600 years ago, they are no longer relevant in the 21st century and we should stop teaching kids to write as if they were.

Other though-provoking ideas:

One of the principles the IRS uses in deciding whether to allow deductions is that, if something is fun, it isn’t work. Fields that are intellectually unsure of themselves rely on a similar principle.

and

Indeed, English classes may even be harmful. In my case they were effectively aversion therapy. Want to make someone dislike a book? Force him to read it and write an essay about it.

History was like that for me. It took me 10 years to recover from the damage that Mrs Timm did to my love of history.

If I didn’t add that Paul Graham’s essay is a meta-essay about essay writing. He studies an unfinished essay (about essay writing) within an essay and that the quotes I quoted are not the form that they took in his final version, Paul Graham might be disgusted with me and I wouldn’t want that. The final essay is here.

Now this would make a cool project for a science fair:

He was nominated for a Nobel Prize. I don’t care about any of this. Shafik won my heart by publishing a paper in European Urology in which he investigated the effects of polyester on sexual activity. Ahmed Shafik dressed lab rats in polyester pants.

There were seventy-five rats. They wore their pants for one year. Shafik found that over time the ones dressed in polyester or poly-cotton blend had sex significantly less often than the rats whose slacks were cotton or wool. (Shafik thinks the reason is that polyester sets up troublesome electrostatic fields in and around the genitals. Having seen an illustration of a rat wearing the pants, I would say there’s an equal possibility that it’s simply harder to get a date when you dress funny.)

I Stumbled Upon a cool site for kids at the BBC. They have a whole bunch of games but I am playing this one: Questionaut Key Stage 2.

It’s a bit like the Python Challenge for little kids.

I am stuck on Stage 6 and was feeling silly because the quiz had been pretty easy up to that point. I tried to google the answer but it turns out that a lot of people are stuck on stage 3

I decided to stay stuck for a while and not look at the answer. Maybe my son will come to my rescue?

There are more puzzles there. Some easier, some harder. Fantastic site.

[Here's a post that I started about 2 years ago and probably will never finish - which is a shame because it would've been a good one....]

I always look forward to the Science Fair because …

…. rant about baking soda volcanos

…. rant about the winner is a model

…. discussion about benefit of helping kids

…. follow-up post about constructionism

… a bit about Jazz’s piano teacher

Dylan had to make a castle for school and made Leeds Castle which is just up the road from where my sister lives.

If you look closely, you can see the Frenchman in the tower about to fetchez la vache to throw at the silly English kerniggets below.

A new book, The Age of American Unreason, revives the one about society getting stupider.

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”

My guess is that the elites have been moaning about the ignorance of the plebs in every country in every age since the dawn of time. The only difference in the USA in modern times is the expectation that everyone will go to college so that, when college graduates don’t know some piece of trivia, they bring a stain of ignorance on every American.

When I was a lad in England, it was quite rare for people to go to college - even very clever people. You could function very well without going. My sister, for example, left school at 16 to work in a bank and, by 18, was a supervisor. Her son, my nephew, followed in her footsteps and was a bank manager by the age of 22.

Even at my rather elite school, only about 15% of people went to college. Many skipped college for lucrative careers as traders on the stock exchange or as salesmen. It wasn’t considered an inferior career path either. Except for the truly brilliant people, the merely very intelligent ones had a real choice to go or not to go with very little societal pressure either way. There were very few jobs that were restricted to college graduates.

Over here and now, you can’t get any kind of decent job at all without a degree - so everyone has to have a degree whether they want one or not. I have never seen a study on this, but I’ll bet that the net effect is that the average education is worse as a result.

How come they don’t have science education programmes like this over here?