[ECAR Symposium] - Alan Kay

I'm finally getting a chance to catch up with posting my notes from the 2003 ECAR Symposium that happened last week. This was a really good forum - smallish (140 attendees), short (day and a half), with great content.

ECAR is the Educuase Center for Applied Research. It is largely the brainchild of Richard Katz, who is not only Vice President of Educause (the largest professional association in higher ed computing), who is trying mightily to get us to focus on finding out what is actually happening in our field so we can make decisions based not only on intuition and anecdote but at least partly informed by real data. Not an undertaking for the faint of heart - something nobody would accuse Richard of.

Alan Kay gave the keynote presentation. His talk was titled "Back To The Future - Real Math, Real science, Real Children, Real Computing" and he spoke of how it is possible to teach very young children math, science, and computing in ways far more meaningful than is commonly done today. He talked about how children learn from actually doing things and observing results, and can then generalize from those results, rather than by memorizing wrote answers. He showed a fifth grade class where they recreated Galileo's gravity experiment, dropping balls of differing weights from a height, and recorded the results on video. Using the Squeak programming environment, they were able to analyze results side-by-side for the different drops, and time the ball drops.

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

My complete notes from his talk are posted here.