ECAR San Diego 11/20/2003

Alan Kay

Back To The Future - Real Math, Real science, Real Children, Real Computing

'88-89 Vivarium program

The word real in the context of these four areas. In k-12 "real" has been redefined, and they've redefined the other words to match the impoverished definition of "real".

"the amazing amount of remediation done in unversities". Part of the job of education is to deal with matching students up with some of the knowledge, but prep that has to be done to make that possible hasnt been done. Didnt need to be done 150 years ago when higher ed was a selection process and everybody else went back to the farm.

Real Math - deep understanding and construction of relationships - contrast that with school math - mostly memorizing rules for calculating (e.g. invert & multiply) - Babylonian mathematics - done like law is today - an extensive set of cases that are known to work with very few generalizations and no proofs. Then the greeks came along and generalized.

Science is even worse. California standard - "students know that all matter in the universe is made of atoms" - science standards were derived from the textbooks - textbook publishers and politicians, scientists all quit the panel.

Geometry has a little more overlap between real math and school math than almost anything else.

Most real math is not set up to be appropriate for children.

Children in college can be thought of as "unactualized adults" Piaget estimated that 90% of european children never actualized the symbolic ways of knowing, doing and thinking.

"New Math" - a lot of NSF money and very good people were devoted to trying to do something about this - take the foundations of math and find a way to teach them to children. But problems - not a lot of power in set theory for children.

Have to find the best stuff that is appropriate, right level, and is real. Plato - in general you would like children to follow their desires and talent so wouldnt have to teach math and science to those who are not inclined -but in this county given republican governance all people have to be within conversational distance of this matter - able to deal sensibly with ideas they have to think about.

Problem is not that we need more great thinkers - we have lots of knowledge, but we have a process thats been set up over the last hundred years that is being supported by people who have been educated using this process - somewhat true in higher ed, egregiously true in k-5. If we found teachers who were as ignorant in writing and literature as they are in math and science we would find ways to get rid of them - despite unions and rules. We have the equivalent of South Sea Island "cargo cult" - seems so outrageous and primitively superstitious. K-12 education is primarily administered by people who are not very well educated - who have no knowledge of most of the ideas that have surfaced in the last 400 years. The stuff that is really important in math and science isn't really showing up at all in schools. If kids got 100% on all standardized tests they still wouldnt know anything.

Jerry Bruner - Multiple Ways of Knowing - Towards a Theory of Instruction

Has spent a lot of energy dealing with the erosion of bill of rights.

Enactive (kinesthetic)

Iconic (figurative)

Symbolic

"You can teach any subject to anyone at any age..."

1st grade math - get kids to construct something, then reflect on what they notice.

Montessori said "guessing is what we have to teach children to do differently" - not being done. Kids are stumped when they dont have a pattern to match against.

"Model T" real environments - don't try to teach about a late model automobile, but use a model t. only 300 parts, gauge for spark gap was an american dime. An honest model t model for calculus.

Seymour Papert and Logo - the common sense of differential geometry - can have children play with things and build up their common sense of different forms of addition - but didn't get adapted because second and third wave of teachers didn't know anything about calculus so didn't appreciate the power.

Dynabook - the musical instrument for ideas.

This year is the 30th anniversary of personal computing - the Dynabook - did it to try to get computers into schools.

Interesting thing about 3d is you can have a very different sense of space and user interface.

Squeak - been in the classroom for about four years now - available free on the net.

Stupidest way to use a computer is a surrogate of a book - we already have books and they're cheap. A more pernicious thing is the extension of the use of a book -

WIth younger kids, payoff is in the graphic interaction, but they get the most interesting reactions by manipulating the symbols, and gradually manipulating the symbols become more interesting - which is a huge leap.

Multiple desktops as a place to store state of projects.

One of the worst things in the us is balkanization of math away from science - in the squeak example it's all art and stories.

"can't do science on a computer or a book - otherwise it's just religion" (cause no real world correlation)

"In every class of children there's usually one Galileo - interestingly enough it's usually not the teacher"

Shared spaces -

The best mentors for just in time knowledge for children are usually children

Collaboration means p2p - server state doesn't scale