[OT] HyperCard and the Interactive Web

Richmond richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Sun Feb 26 13:14:47 EST 2012


On 02/26/2012 07:18 PM, Geoff Canyon wrote:
> We're wandering a bit here, but I disagree completely, so of course I
> should reply ;-)

I'm not sure whether we are wandering, as there is some sort of malaise 
among young people
if they think that knowing how to create emoticons in Facebook 
constitutes IT.

What does have to be hammered out, Geoff, is probably some position 
midway between yours and
mine. There is a general disquiet about the way "Computers and IT" 
courses have gone, and
it might not be a bad idea if those of us who are actually engaged in 
both programming and education
got involved in the dialogue.

As I have day-to-day contact with 7-15 year olds who use computers all 
the time, but understand
little or nothing about them, and yet talk "big" about how knowledgeable 
about them they are;
but when "push comes to shove" cannot do anything beyond typing essays 
in 'Office', f*rt around
on Facebook, talk to each other with Skype, and muck around with 
Youtube, I find myself
troubled.

>
> Some 100 years ago, it was considered necessary to memorize log tables.
> That skill is now useless.
>
> I remember (near 50 here as well) learning how to derive a square root.

Wow; your education was even more conservative than mine . . .  :)

> That skill is also useless.

Yes, those skills are useless; but a nodding acquaintance with the
underpinnings of mathematics, and, for the sake of argument, what
logarithms are and why they were used in the past is not useless.

Unless, like Henry Ford you feel a bit anti History.

>
> I agree with you that "It is far more IMPORTANT that kids learn to think
> logically and coherently," but that doesn't at all mean that they learn a
> particular file structure, or machine UI.

Well, frankly, I do wonder how on earth a 12 year old can see his/her 
way through
a set of embedded if . . . end if / for . . . next loops (subroutines) 
if they have not been
taught any basic thinking skills. As, here in Bulgaria, "education" is 
99% fact-cramming,
the country is going to continue with its critical skills shortage for ever.

>   Kids today don't need to know
> what a command line is because the vast majority of them will never see one
> in their lives.

Really? I wonder about that. Surely every potential computer programmer 
should
have some sort of understanding of command lines. This is rather like 
saying that
that children brought up in cities should have no understanding that 
animals are slaughtered
so that they can have meat on their plates, because they will never see 
a slaughter-house.

[Funnily enough, I took my 2 boys, when the older one was 6, down to the 
market in Al_Ain, UAE,
to see the goats and the cows having their throats cut, for exactly the 
same reason as I taught them
some simple command-line stuff on an old PC running FreeDOS].

>   Kids should learn how to think, but in the context of the
> environment they are/will operate in.

Which may change at any moment; so the more things they are exposed to 
the better
chance they have to adapt to whatever circumstances present themselves.

>   A calculator is no more a crutch than
> is an automobile.

A slide-rule helps children (and adults!) visualise numbers and their 
relations to one another;
a calculator does not.

>   People who drive (or fly) from New York to Los Angeles
> should not be first required to learn how to drive a horse and wagon across
> the country.

No, of course they shouldn't because there is nothing to be learned 
about the underpinnings of how
cars or aeroplanes work from going by horse.

But using a GUI-less computer does help a child to understand the 
numerical underpinnings of
how computers work; a fact all to often obscured by WIMP-GUI eye-candy.

The WYSIWYG interface is all well and good; but you and I know full well 
that underneath all
the buttons, fields, images and what-have-you in the Livecode interface 
there are a bunch of scripts
that have been written in plain-vanilla code that have demanded quite a 
bit of boring slog and hard thinking;
and I, for one, would have found that one hell of a lot more difficult 
if I had been under the illusion that
Livecode was just some sort of drag-N-drop LEGO kit that would magically 
make programs to do all the extremely
fancy things that can be done.

One of the most disingenuous claims is that computer programming is 
easy; no it's not, and it takes a long
time to get one's head round things and to become good at it. While it 
is easy to make "powerpoint"
slideshows, it is not easy to do much more.

>
> On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 2:15 AM, Richmond<richmondmathewson at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Speaking as a reactionary 50 year old; I think:
>>
>> 1. No child under the age of 14 should be allowed any mathematical crutch
>> apart from a slide-rule.
>>
>>   I find, in my "EFL" school, that kids find sliderules rather interesting,
>> and they are able to SEE how numbers
>>   work; something one cannot do with a pocket calculator.
>>
>> 2. At 14 children should all be given something like a Pentium 2 with
>> FreeDOS and taught
>>     how to navigate themselves around a system with no GUI.
>>
>> 3. At 14 children should be given a course in something like BASIC or LISP
>> on that GUI-less computer.
>>
>> 3.1. Probably preceded by a few weeks "doing programming" on paper, and
>> messing around with buttons in cups.
>>
>> 4. At 17-18 children should all be given a PC with an operating system
>> with a WIMP-GUI on it after
>>     they have passed a test to demonstrate their familiarity with a
>> Terminal emulator.
>>
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