On 2011-06-14 Tue, at 09:36 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: > 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.
I agree. People seem to define "smart" as something like "things I can't do easily". So, for example, if they can use a keyboard, well someone like a child who can't must not be smart and this is why people were surprised when the mouse and graphical UIs allowed toddlers to use the Mac or touch screens allowed near infants to use iPads today. All along it was an issue of unnatural conceptual mapping (like asking a right handed person to throw with their left hand) that was the problem, not a lack of smarts. From this perspective we could see the history of programming as one of finding ever more natural mappings between how our minds work and how we can get machines to do what we want - just as steering wheel and floor pedals map between our bodies and our vehicles. If so, which mappings are more natural and under which circumstances seems to be the important question and one, AFAICS, that may not well answered by simply replacing words with ideograms and expressions with boxes and arrows. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
