Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas

It's not the "toy" part that's signifiant. It's the "tinker" part. Think of a 50's automobile with a carburetor and a distributor. You can take apart and tinker with those. In a 2009 car, the distributor and associated parts are a throwaway lump of plastic with metal tabs coming out. "Explorable" is perhaps an even better term. Squeak had the same aims. Skip to 8:20. You'll see kids using the software to explore robotics and do physics of gravitation. link to this video

…ghtning talk (which I now can't seem to find...). If it's more general "best of", I'd expect something like Guy Steele "growing a language" : link Douglas Engelbart "the mother of all demos": link Alan Kay "doing with images makes symbols": link Or, if that's too long, the much more condensed ted talk: "a powerful idea about teaching ideas": link to this video (Maybe that's not a "tech talk"?) Rich Hickey "simple made easy" : link To name a few of the top of my head.…

…r Etoys more than 20 years ago now -- most of the followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk. I was curious about this TED talk, and found the part where he demonstrates Etoys in the section called "Personal Computing & Children Today". Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas link to this video The way he interacts with a running program, moving statements around and editing them, observing the values of variables as they change.. It's really an ancestor of Snap, and I can see its influence on Bret Victor's talks like Inventing on Principle. --- Mike Travers' thesis, "Agar: An Animal Construction Kit" is an entertaining and though…