Alan Kay, in a sprawling interview in Fast Company, talks about some inspirations for his work at PARC. McLuhan, Montessori, and Papert, among others.
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If you read [Marshall] McLuhan, the first thing you realize is: Wow, if we could make something like a printing press—but its content is the next level of dealing with complexity, beyond what we could do with prose and written-down mathematics and stuff like that—we can actually create a media environment that the acclimation to [which], just like the acclimation to the printing press, would be another level of thought.
if you look at [educator Maria] Montessori’s first two books, both were really important. Education was like the third thing she got good at. She was the first woman in Italy to have a medical degree. Her undergraduate degree was in engineering. She was also one of the two or three leading experts in anthropology in Italy. So when she got into education, you had a mind far, far beyond almost anybody who’s ever really thought about it.
She was the one who, early on, got onto this idea that we’re driven genetically to learn the culture around us. One of the things she said was, look, the problem is, the culture around most children, whether at home or in school, is like the 10th century, and we’re living in the 20th century. If you really want them to learn, if you want them all to learn, it can’t be like choosing a musical instrument because you’re interested in it. Everybody learns their culture, because it’s in the form of a culture, and that trumps any particular interest we have.
This is what McLuhan was talking about too. That’s a big deal. It’s a difference between taking a class in something and living in something. So if you want to fix this, you gotta fix the schools, and get the kids to grow up in the 21st century, rather than being in a technological version of the 11th century.
I got into thinking about personal computing from a child’s point of view, because of an encounter with Seymour Papert, the Logo [programming language] guy in the ’60s. I had heard about him, went to visit him in ’68. I read all his stuff. Papert was a mathematician. I have a degree in math and I could see what he was doing. It was like, “Holy shit. This is the best idea anybody’s ever had.” It was profound.
One of the things he was doing was taking something that pretty much everybody who knew computers and math all knew, but had never thought about, in terms of children.
There are profound things in mathematical thinking and the way it models the world that are traditionally left until high school, and even college, for a variety of reasons. They are abstract, but there are things about the way the child’s mind works that, if you just took that into account seriously—and Papert did and only a few other people did—back then, you could immediately invent a mathematics that was real mathematics and perfectly suited for them.
He realized, “Oh, we could take the real content out here as a version in the child’s world that is still the real thing.” It’s not a fake version of math. It’s kind of like little league, or even T-ball. In sports they do this all the time. In music, they do it all the time. The idea is, you never let the child do something that isn’t the real thing—but you have to work your ass off to figure out what the real thing is in the context of the way their minds are working at that developmental level.
When I saw what Papert was doing, while I recognized it immediately, it had just never occurred to me. And then that nanosecond I realized this is what McLuhan was talking about. This is what Montessori was talking about. This thing is the equivalent of the Montessori school.
Papert had the great metaphor. He said, “Look if you want to learn French, don’t take it in fifth or sixth grade. Go to France, because everything that makes learning French reasonable, and everything that helps learning French, is in France. If you want to do it in the United States, make a France.” This is equivalent to what Montessori was saying: If you want to live in the 21st century, you’d better embody it. You can’t teach it in a classroom. And so, Papert was saying, “Hey, this is math. It’s not just learning math. It’s an environment. It has all these things.”
Once you realize kids have to be sensible, literate users of computers, because when are you going to learn how to read? Only a few people learn how to read as adults. You learn how to read as a child.
And it was the perfect timing, because this was just like two years before going to PARC. I finished my PhD. I started thinking about this. I said, “If we’re gonna do a personal computer”—and that’s what I wanted PARC to do and that’s what we wound up doing [with the Alto]—”the children have to be completely full-fledged users of this thing.”
Think about what this means in the context of say, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad. They aren’t full-fledged users. They’re just television watchers of different kinds.
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I was working for Kim Veltman at the McLuhan Centre at the University of Toronto when I got started on illustrating things from the history of perspective. I created an animation of a vanishing point using AutoCAD 9 or 10. More detail and an SVG version of the animation are on my blog
Bored in math classes at school and profoundly entranced by programming at home, I have wanted to improve education with computing my whole life. A particularly vivid memory rings true with Alan Kay's expressed disappointment. In a computer lab in middle school or early high school, I generalized a logo triangle function into a polygon function and felt like I'd just stolen fire from the gods. The adults around me were not particularly impressed -- I think they only saw a kid doodling with a computer.
My volunteer work with OWL included a really fun chance to pass on that fire with LOGO, fractals, recursion, and functional programming. link
Montessori and Piaget developed very similar notions of child development. Papert's work was heavily influenced by his time working with Piaget. link
I tweeted a couple thoughts to Bret Victor when he posted a complaint in this direction.
"Related alarm: Papert gave us turtle geometry in 1967. That is, made differential geometry appropriate for elementary school."
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It's as if someone offered us a zero and we collectively said, "No thanks. I'll keep teaching division with roman numerals." tweet
Dismantling Mathematical Privilege is making a similar appeal to an audience of mathematical educators. Dan Meyer opens his talk with a story of his own surprise and delight in learning the relationship between regular polygons and circles.
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I learned that turtle geometry was differential geometry from Mark Gross when he was a professor at the College of Environmental Design at the University of Colorado in the early 90s. Mark had worked at the ATARI Cambridge Research Lab in the early 80s. Alan Kay had been ATARI's chief scientist between his time at Xerox PARC and his later move to Apple.
Ward Cunningham and his friends in the object oriented programming community mixed deep study of Smalltalk-80 with deep study of Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language. So my later career in OO is deeply tied to this lineage as well.
Cynthia Solomon helped create LOGO wikipedia
Adele Goldberg helped create Smalltalk wikipedia
Note to self to get better about naming the women involved instead of perpetuating shortcuts that mean Alan Kay and Seymour Papert get credit for work that was done by many.