On 15/06/2011, at 9:00 AM, Kevin Driedger wrote: > I wonder if a thousand years ago the readers of the world thought that only > certain people had an aptitude for reading. > ===== > > As a professional coder and father of young children I find Dethe's anecdote > of teaching his children to code/program at an early age has me thinking I > need to take another stab at showing Scratch again to my children.
The thing that irritates me about this attitude of "don't consider kids as equal" is that we DO consider them as equal in other frames... we expect so much of them in terms of linguistic and cognitive development... and actually the abstractions (zero-th order abstraction) capable of and exhibited by a 5 year old are used when in the activity called "programming" all the time... so much so we as adult programmers rarely think about them. Some of the structural patterns that a small child already has at least some mastership of are connection, fitting, representation, indirection, context, mood, physical relationship. These are all used in simple programming. Perhaps they don't have the meta-words, but that's okay - that can come later at about 12 when they begin their next level of abstract cognitive development (ie proper abstract thought). My flatmate's 7 year old daughter is in the process of mastering addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. These things are quite abstract. My flatmate's THREE year old (!!) understands in a non-verbal way the idea of a pointer and mouse connection. Do you realise how advanced that idea is? Consider that he's only really begun to talk in sentences properly in the last 6 to 8 weeks. It's very simple in terms of our usage of computers, but it's an incredibly complex structural pattern, really... it's representation and indirection... you move this thing, and it represents this other thing, and we can use it to manipulate yet more things... of course the child doesn't realise that the things on the screen aren't real that they're simply further representations... but you get the gist... the capacity is there... and the ENERGY that is there is amazing... Julian. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
