Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a condensed version of Kay's ideas on education and computing, showing kids using software to explore physics and robotics.
What it is
Alan Kay's TED talk on teaching ideas, in which he argues the world is not what it seems and shows children learning through programming and building their own lessons with Etoys/Squeak.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2009 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends stcredzero · 2009-07 · on “The iPodTouch Is What The OLPC XO Should Have Been”
It's not the "toy" part that's signifiant. It's the "tinker" part. Think of a 50's automobile with a carburetor and a distributor. You can take apart and tinker with those. In a 2009 car, the distributor and associated parts are a throwaway lump of plastic with metal tabs coming out. "Explorable" is perhaps an even better term. Squeak had the same aims. Skip to 8:20. You'll see kids using the software to explore robotics and do physics of gravitation. [this video]
Recommends e12e · 2018-09 · on “Show HN: TechYaks – Best of 50k tech talks ranked by confidence intervals”
Maybe these are mostly too new, or you have different (more practical, hands on?) definition of tech-talk - but from a quick look the only speakers I expected - and found - were Sandi Mets and Rob Pike. If it's practical, I'm surprised not to see the js "wat" lightning talk (which I now can't seem to find...). If it's more general "best of", I'd expect something like Guy Steele "growing a language" : [LINK] Douglas Engelbart "the mother of all demos": [LINK] Alan Kay "doing with images makes symbols": [LINK] Or, if that's too long, the much more condensed ted talk: "a powerful idea about teaching ideas": [this video] (Maybe that's not a "tech talk"?) Rich Hickey "simple made easy" : [LINK] To nam
Cites lioeters · 2024-06 · on “KidPix”
> all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original one I designed for Etoys more than 20 years ago now -- most of the followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk. I was curious about this TED talk, and found the part where he demonstrates Etoys in the section called "Personal Computing & Children Today". Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas [this video] The way he interacts with a running program, moving statements around and editing them, observing the values of variables as they change.. It's really an ancestor of Snap, and I can see its influence on Bret Victor's talks like Inventing on Principle. --- Mike Trave