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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
If you find this essay compelling, you might be interested in the game I'm working on, Codemancer ( <a href="http://codemancergame.com/" rel="nofollow">http://codemancergame.com/</a> ). 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.<p>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.
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:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>If you can read code, those are questions you can ask.
I used to play a lot with Lego when I was young, and programming is not much different from that.<p>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).
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.
"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.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvgef9ABDUc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvgef9ABDUc</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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."<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>It's not about encouraging mediocrity; it's about saying there's nothing wrong with failing.
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?
If you liked this essay (which I did), you are probably going to be interested in Audrey Watters's Hack Education blog. [0]<p>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.<p>0: <a href="http://hackeducation.com/" rel="nofollow">http://hackeducation.com/</a>
Thoughtful and clearly written. I also have a six-year-old daughter and many of the same concerns.<p>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.<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/AlanKay_2007" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/AlanKay_2007</a>
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.
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.<p>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.
> 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?<p>Of course they could, but corporations couldn't earn millions in this case.
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.<p>Although labview based software was utter crap. There was an open source C based version. That was my first building blocks.<p>I'm thinking of getting my nephew one.
Nice article, but I think you'd do many a favor by increasing the text color contrast to make it more readable: <a href="http://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://dannas.github.io/2016/08/27/review-of-seymor-paperts-mindstorms.html" rel="nofollow">http://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://dannas.github.io/2016...</a>
I think schools should teach only functional programming, because it's much more challenging and better suits the purpose of educating the students.<p>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.<p>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.