Alan Kay Squeak Demo at ACM1 (2001)

[Music]

good morning good to see you welcome

back to ACM 1 I hope you don't own too

many of the wrong stocks today and I

hope they go back up real soon I hope your um yes right so are you

ready for a big day tell you what let's take attendance let's put up the seating

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and now please if you have been to the expo to the ACM 1 Expo next door would

you please show green to the front show us green if you've been and excellent

and those of you who have not been to the XO Expo I urge you to do so it's

right outside it'll be open till 4:00 o'clock today and I guess your big opportunity to do that is not to walk

out on the upcoming speech but rather to go during the two-hour lunch break

from 12:00 to 2:00 now many too many of

us still tend to think of computers as data processing machines or we tend to

think of the internet as an email box of some kind but at 8 cm 97 bran Ferren

expressed an entirely different view

[Music]

every time a significant storytelling

technology has been introduced to the world it changed the course of

civilization or rather we change the course of civilization with it and this

can be language it can be writing it can be printing that can be radio television

it can be poetry it can be animation and

now it's getting to be computers now no

person that I know understands what bran is talking about better than Alan Kay I

first met Alan in 1972 at the Xerox Palo

Alto Research Center where he was busy down the hall inventing personal

computers he had he had previously graduated in mathematics and molecular

biology from the University of Colorado and received his PhD in 1969 from the

University of Utah Allen is best known for his ideas about personal computing

and the intimate laptop computer and his inventions of overlapping window

interface modern object-oriented inventions of overlapping window

interface and modern object-oriented do not want to get into a fight about who

invented modern object-oriented programming his interest in children of

course and children and education were the catalyst for his many many

ideas today Alan is the vice president research is vice president research and

development of Walt Disney Imagineering where he is a Disney fellow a former

professional jazz guitarist composer and theatrical designer he is now an amateur

classical pipe organist today Alan will

attempt a lifetime first he's told me that he has never given a talk in less

than 30 minutes please join me in welcoming Alan Kay

thank you so here are looking at the

future and many people have pointed out that some decades ago nobody knew what

the future is going to be but of course that wasn't so there was a very good

road map of the future back in the 60s in the ARPA community a dream going all

the way back to the late 50s about a worldwide information utility and the

start of interactive graphical computing with ivan sutherland in the early 60s

1962 in that very same year the machine i think of as the first personal

computer which is wes clark slink on 65 was when Gordon Moore's first article

and data mayshen appeared putting forth Moore's law and so by the time sharing

it happen by then and people were starting to do interactive computing and

so there are a lot of components there that made it very easy to predict that

personal computing was going to happen year or two later flatscreen displays

started to show up in laboratories and

and so on and so forth and the I think the difficult thing for most of the

people back then was that they're trying to be practical reason they missed

predicting the future is that they are trying to be incremental on the

infrastructure that existed rather than being romantic about what it would be

really neat to have and what would be especially good for children to have so

I'm going to talk a little bit about why the computer revolution hasn't happened

yet but first if we could have the computers screen

one of the things that always happens in talks is the people behind all of these

ideas never get their due so I just made this complicated panoply of influences

on us of cognitive influences computer influences here's our group

here's some of the people we work with here's our interns and in the background

we have a an open-source community courtesy of the internet and so I guess

the the right title for this slide is

that science is a great open source process it was one of the original open

source processes and you actually make progress by giving your ideas away we

wouldn't be where we were if science was a closed process business people have

not learned this yet they want to make

money there has to be Bob Noyce used to say engineers make wealth and everybody

else just moves it around so to me the

way I think of the future is I don't even worry about the technology and

there's a nice suggestion here by Marshall McLuhan that children are the

messages we send the future but not exactly they really are the future we're

sending to the future there isn't anything else that's much interesting

about the future except the people who are going to be there and so helping

children grow into the next several generations of adults is the most

important thing we can do and if we go

to graduation at one of the nation's

greatest universities Harvard University about ten years ago right after the

seniors flipped their tassels NSF took a camera around and interviewed a number

of them about a few simple ideas about

the about the world and so let's hear

that they test how a lifetime of education affects our understanding of science we ask these recent graduates

some simple questions in astronomy consider for example that the causes of

the seasons is a topic taught in every standard curriculum okay I think the seasons happens because as the earth

travels around the Sun it gets nearer to the Sun which produces warmer weather

and gets farther away which produces colder weather and thence and hence the

seasons how hot it is or how cold it is in any given time of the year has to do

with the the closeness of the earth to the Sun during the seasonal periods the

earth goes around the Sun and and it

gets hotter when we get closer to the Sun and it gets colder when we get further away from the Sun these

graduates like many of us think of the Earth's orbit as a highly exaggerated

ellipse even though the Earth's orbit is very nearly circular with distance

producing virtually no effect on the seasons we carry with us the strong

incorrect belief that changing distance is responsible for the seasons I took

physics planetary motion and relativity

electromagnetic seasons and waves I've never really had a scientific background

whatsoever and I and I got through school without having it I've gotten very far without having it I had quite a

bit of science in high school yeah through physics want first year in two

years of chemistry regardless of their science education 21 of the 23 randomly

selected students faculty and alumni of Harvard University revealed

misconceptions when asked to explain either the scenes or the phases of the

Moon when it's further away from the Sun then it gets colder the earth position

interferes with the reflection of the Sun against the moon so we can see that

the main curriculum at Harvard must be confidence 101

[Applause]

but of course it's not just restricted to Ivy League colleges I was waiting for

NSF to ask the next logical questions but they didn't in this wonderful video

you can get it over the internet called the private universe and but a couple of

weeks later is at UCLA and found that the audience before the talk I was

giving there we're mostly graduating seniors so I asked them to come outside with me and I one by one I asked them

the same two questions and got about the same results about ninety-five percent

of them had serious misconceptions about

one or either and then I got to ask the the next question which is well tell me

this if the proximity of the earth to the Sun has something to do with the seasons then tell me do you know what

when it's summer up here in the northern hemisphere what season it is in the

southern hemisphere and every single one of them knew that it was winter they

didn't know why obviously

but it was odd so they'd remembered it and I think I'm justified by induction

to claim that the Harvard students and this professor here all knew that then

there was about a 30-second pause while I watched each of these people

struggling with this fact that they'd had in their head conflicted completely

with their proximity theory that was one of those sort of hmm and for this

professor the question for those who are confused about the phases of the Moon

I'd ask them well have you ever seen the Sun and the moon in the sky at the same

time and actually anybody who walked out the fairmount this morning anybody do

that moon is right there was it in phase anybody see it this is

my favorite thing as people have seen this zillions of times and the moon was

visible in the sky and so was the Sun and the moon was in phase and therefore

it is very hard to imagine how anything could be between the Sun and the moon if

you can see them both in the sky so now

what's going on here variety of things but most important thing for this talk

is that these Harvard kids were just thinking normally they're doing

absolutely normal human thinking which is to compartmentalize the knowledge II

make each one into a little story and so forth and this is basically the future

we're sending to the future and mostly have been for the last 80,000 years

basically cave people now they have atomic weapons and if you take this

common-sense way of looking at the world that has been around for many tens of

thousands of years let's pick on Yale this time give this guy a Yale diploma

and dress them up a little bit

he could he can go very far in most

people's estimation and sure enough a

couple of weeks after Bush took office he started bombing Iraq just to show

them that he had a spear it's in this

case is a missile and this is basically what's going on so it's very easy to

predict the next 50 years and that is for most people it's going to be just

the way it is right now it's going to be more glittery things around more distractions

but as Neil postman pointed out that

people in the 20th century accept more things on faith than they did in the

Middle Ages because most people accept all the things on faith that were

accepted on faith in the Middle Ages plus there's all that new science stuff

that most people accept on faith and all the new medicine that they accept on

faith so for most people very little has

changed except things in the environment

and of course I really was looking for modern uses of Spears today and I was

going to go on the internet to find it but the LA Times last weekend blessed me

with a front page article on the revival

of headhunting in Borneo and here are these guys around motorcycles but they

have their Spears and they actually have beheaded at least 500 people now as it

says here they are using traditional

weapons to defend themselves and send away evil because it disturbs the harmony of life and they eat their

hearts to subdue their victims spirits

and absorb their magic this is perfectly normal behavior it's been going on for

tens of thousands of of years just let

me go let me go back here for a second

and the thing that struck me is worse was another article in The New York

Times which reminded me that slavery still exists many places in the world

including this recent thing that came up that these little paper clips that all

of us use are made by slaves that were purchased

from a woman's prison this is going on today and there are many aspects of

slavery going on all over the world as I speak here so pretty frightening

sorry so one way of looking at this is

McLuhan's way of the goldfish in the bowl I set out and who discovered water

but it wasn't a fish we are the fish and the pink water that the fish can't see

are our underlying assumptions about the world our deep beliefs and you get a

model of thinking that Arthur Kessler came up with is if you take the pink

water in the bowl and make it a plane you're the aunt crawling along is like

human thought having the illusion of making progress being able to set goals

get around obstacles and so forth but never being aware that it's doing a flat

instead of pink ideas of course every time once in a while a little blue idea

comes along but we've all gone to school

many people go to church we all have parents so there are powerful forces to

ker-splat those little outlaw ideas but

every once in a while you're taking a shower out for a run and one of these

epiphanies comes how many people have had one of these big epiphanies feels

like it comes from the heavens because it was in our subconscious not in our

conscious and the old days when people had these they'd go out and start a new religion because it does appear to come

from the heavens but we know today that most ideas wherever they come from are

mediocre down to bad and so it's very

important to be careful about these ones that seem to come from heaven because

they're likely to be bad ideas as well and Kessler pointed out that you get a

mixture of emotional reactions when this happens if it's a joke you start

laughing and in science it's an aha which

they also laugh about because of course the world didn't change just because we got to see it a little better so all of

these things we found out about the world are lurking beyond our ability to

see them and then the most important one

is this long drawn-out ah of art because one of art's main purposes is to remind

us that there's more to be thought about than is currently in our little pink

context and a lot of the way of getting

from the mundane world to better

different ideas is through artistic

thinking I think bill Buxton will say a few words about that as well as to me is

the number one important thing to think about when you're trying to send

children into the future in a more enlightened way and that is to develop

every child's initial aesthetic approach to the world and then the kicker for

modern education of invented ideas is

that it takes almost as much creativity to learn one of these ideas as it did to

invent it in the first place and this is where school is completely wrong because school is basically set up to teach

stuff that's fairly easy for kids to learn and the problem is most of the

important ideas to learn now are not easy to learn and so we have to find a

way of allowing getting the kids to be creative enough to break out of their

little pink planes is our friend Betty

Edwards who teaches drawing to people and one of the things she does in the

very first day of her class is say that

you know the problem with drawing is not that you can't move your hand but you're already interpreting what you see too

much so she shows them these two tables and she says you know this table shape

top shape is exactly the same as this table shot top shape and everybody says

no that can't possibly be true and she says well look I'm gonna take this guy

off here and I'll rotate it and I'll

just pick it up and take a look at that it's even

amazing if you just bring it over here it is very hard to see that this length was exactly the same as that length

that's another way of thinking about what our problem with the world is and

the Talmud points out we've seen see things not as they are but as we are and

I'm often wondered what happened to the person who came up with that idea in an

Orthodox faith because if you take it to its logical conclusion it's not where

the timid really wanted to go so

Montessori had this great idea she pointed out the children are set up to

learn in a village culture through play imitation and the problem with 20th

century now 21st century knowledge is that most of it is opaque to children

unlike the knowledge in a traditional culture and so her idea is we have to

give the kids modern environments and

modern toys where the kids accept these toys as play toys but they have

interesting side effects and she spent many years of her life designing toys

designed to be pleasurable for the kids and to have worthwhile side effects on

their common sense and one of the the

main tasks we have is to ask ourselves what are the 21st century thinker toys

going to have to be in order to get this

uncommon sense as Montessori put it that she was trying to shape and again the

the route there is through art and this haha combination of breaking through the

pink plane to the blue plane well it's a little background for what we might

choose as some goals for making a future and I I got involved in this stuff

through no fault of my own I believe ed

Sheila and I are working on this desktop machine back at Utah in the 60s 1968 i

visited seymour papert and kids were doing programs like this too they would

make a circle with their body then seem over to ask them what are you doing and heeds they'd say

well I'm going a little and turning a little over and over type that into logo

forward five right five repeated over and over again execute it and you get

this perfect circle no x squared plus y squared equals R squared the reason is

is that the turtle is a vector and this is a differential equation in inertial

coordinates which is the language of differential geometry which is the main

language of most hard sciences today and

here were these kids treating this as a toy logo is a toy and Seymour was not

trying to teach them calculus he was trying to do what Montessori said we

should do for young kids what you want to do is to teach them the intuitive background for modern knowledge give

them a big tree with lots of branches to hand to hang these more crisp ideas on

later but build that uncommon sense tree

while the children are Leong so I thought this is the best idea that ever

seen for what a computer might be good for which is to help children grow up

thinking better than most adults do today but of course I realized there was

a Zen problem here even in 1968 programmers were kind of

the the least unenlightened people I knew they could take this beautiful silk

purse of a computer with all of its possibilities and turn it into the sow's

ear of most software and if anything

that has gotten worse today rather than better so that made me think of the

computer being kind of like a piano you can put pianos in every classroom but

the music is not in it it's an amplifier of musical impulse in a person and you

can develop that musical impulse in a person without a piano or any other

musical instrument because we already are musical instruments and then the

these wonderful instruments that have been invented are amplifiers of these

musical impulses so the Zen is something it's like there's a Zen in music the Zen

is not in the piano the Zen has to be developed in humans has to be developed

and then can I it with various kinds of technology so coming back in the plane

from Utah from that visit I started thinking about a kitty computer and

realized it could not be a desktop computer like the Flex machine because

kids are mobile I had this image of them being taking it out like we take out

books books are nice because you can take them out and think your own

thoughts with them and so this image of two kids learning science by programming

a collaborative space board game was kind of the first image I had and taking

the Dynabook to the tidepools and these

this notion of an instrument whose music is ideas and of course music is an idea

so music had to be part of this and so

forth then I was wondering whether we'd ever get done before we died because if

we look back in history there was a great technology invented around the middle of the fifth 15th century here

called printing but the real printing

revolution really happened in the 1600s so it lagged by about 150 years the

biggest change is from the printing press happened here when people start

gradually had learned how to argue in a very different way and think about what

knowledge meant in a very different way in both science and the social argument

that led to various Democratic revolutions happened in this period of

time and so the mainframe was kind of

the manuscript book only ownable by an institution and so we had these ideas of

desktop computing and then these intimate laptop computers we call them

today and I was wondering how much of a

lag is there actually going to be before the real computer revolution happens

because if you look at this as being the real printing revolution required a

rather large number of people to learn how to read and write and to be

conversant with the powerful ideas that could be best expressed in a book so it's not a

question of making the possibility of it here the Gutenberg Bible was set up to

look as much like old manuscript books as possible so as not to scare anybody

one of the major uses of the printing

press besides printing Bibles back then was printing indulgences for the

Catholic Church so as a early form of paper money actually because indulgences

were traded back and forth as currency so they're many mundane uses of printing

back then before the real stuff kicked in and I would claim that what's been

going on especially since 1980 could hardly have been more mundane it could

hardly have been more of a caricature of what people were thinking about in the

60s and 70s so short talk can't go

through all of the goals you'd like to have here but one way of thinking about

this stuff is that because of the way our our minds work minds are a little

language machines everything comes to us

filtered and it's kind of like a shadow show for instance gravity let's say is

the real bunny out here cast this shadow and Newton's theory of gravitation is

expressed in mathematics was kind of like making a shadow out of your hands

and we try and get it to cast a similar a shadow to the bunny shadow as possible

and it worked for a long time until somebody noticed that the real bunny had

a little round tail on it and it was hard to make a little round tail with

your arm being in the way and so Einstein in order to get that little

round tail on there had to go to a completely different way of looking at

gravity and a different set of mathematics which if you only looked at this part of it gave you a nice

Newtonian bunny and then it had this extra stuff on here as well and it's

important to realize that you can put on a fun shadow show without making anything representational language is

about language not about the real world and Einstein really realized that and he said a number of

wonderful things one of my favorites is you must learn to distinguish between what is true and what is real what is

true is what you can do in mathematics and what is real is out there and as he

said as far as mathematics refers to reality it is not certain and as far as

math is certain it does not refer to reality and so this I believe is the

modern view of science which is that science is a negotiation between

the limitations of our representations and what our brain can make of things

and the kinds of probings we can do out there and the important thing about this is

this is one of the greatest heuristics for making progress in all areas that

has ever been invented it's just the knowledge that all you're only dealing

in maps and therefore in order for the map to work the map has to have

criticisms about how well it is doing it it has to be scaffolded and Krzyzewski

fifty or sixty years ago said that one

measure of sanity is the comparison between what's in here and what's out

there and by that measure all humans are at least unsane and some of us are quite

dangerously so and so an interesting global goal for sending children into

the future might be to send them into the future a little less unsane than the

adults that are occupy our world today

so these are all thoughts from back then and a few years before I had gotten my

particular slant on what I called objects which were a biological approach

to computing and the simplest way of

thinking about is the idea is computers all the way down was influenced quite a

bit by some of the thinking that was going on about the ARPANET having

networks of computers many many computers and at some point I realized

that if you only had little software computers that were made out of only

little software computers you'd have this great way of always retaining full

power on all of your representations you'd never degenerate to a data structure that had to be interpreted

from the outside that these objects when you sent them over a network would take

their main interpreters along with them rather than being these raw packets of

bits that somebody would have to write an interpreter for at the other end and so forth this is because my background

was in molecular biology and sketchpad

had already started using ideas like that and sketchpad 3 had already had

multiple windows multiple windows go all the way back into the early 60s so there

a lot of ideas about using this and if we come up to the present and take a

look at modern objects here 2001 a lot

of different things here so you know a movie is a as an object in this system I

love her but I have to move this talk along little game is completely made of

everything in here is made out of objects there's a little pong game we

can move the paddle and so forth this 3d

bunny is sitting on what looks like a 2d

desktop here so if I said the bunny Luce

see it actually comes out in front it's

a little hard to see exactly what's going on until the bunny actually starts

going behind now you get a better idea of the relationship of 2d and 3d space

in this system is that they're actually intermingled if you think about it why

not you don't want to be slaves of a

desk top another interesting way of

looking at it is this thing we're all familiar with it which is word wrap

but what is going on back there in this

biological way of looking at things these letters are actually little

objects that are like little animals and

one of the things we've taught them is to follow the leader in a couple of different ways so this way when I say do

your thing only the letter capital H knows what to do everybody else has to

follow kind of cute it's nice because

this is a program that kids can figure out because it's basically holding the hands and falling you notice that these

guys are active it's going to bounce them around with the margin here now

more direct way of programming this is to not move until somebody has called to

you that I'm in my right place so the H will go there and now everybody's

stopped until they know that they can go and they go so that's kind of cute and

if we do it all behind the scenes we get

this fiction of instant thing and this

is just typical distributed algorithm in a real dynamic OOP system okay so

another thing you can build out of these are overlapping object interfaces here's

a little recorder more here that's going

to so we can record demos and so forth

and I've just got it turning this guy back on again because I want to show you a way of thinking about the abstraction

of this if every object has the same DNA

then there really must be just wearing costumes and this little mouse up here

is a button if I click on the button I'll reveal what's actually here which

is each of these types here is actually made out of one type

and the abstraction here we're showing is just what their countries are and if

you have a dynamic object system you can also count the object so I'll execute

this program here and say please count all the objects there and it says they're about 750,000 objects in this

group of things part of which is this this demo

ok so Universal basically a universal

algebra if you like mathematics and the

way we divide it up is one language so

it's like if a kid learns English they're learning the language of Shakespeare but they might they might be

10 or 15 years away from being able to appreciate Shakespeare but there's a

continuity of using language for talking about a whole bunch of different things so in this system which is called squeak

which is a derive from the work that we did at Xerox PARC

there are basically three views of this

single language and single system and the operating system which this has its

own is written in the same language that the kids do their programming in that

brings us to kids we've been working with many thousands of children over

many many years this is the hard part of the research because the average

educational experiment doesn't go right

and whether it goes right or wrong is very very hard to tell why so

longitudinal experiments over many years are necessary to get even the simplest

amounts of information and basically

what I'm going to show you a little bit today in these examples are some of the

things that we do with nine ten and eleven year old children so we started

off with a blank slate if a kid is getting this on the internet they get a

set of hints but the learning here is

actually by doing construction and each one of these things is like a little

three or four minute project with lots

of reflection I'm just going to run through some of the things so I get

a little palette drop it in to get a

painting and the first thing I'll do is kind of the quintessential project here

which is a little car that you can learn

how to drive design a car is seen from

the top both boys and girls love putting

on big off-road tires when they do this

we don't give the kids clipart because it's very important for them to learn

how to draw this is more of this art and

play so the kid makes the car the way

they want it and it immediately is made into something that they can do things

with and they can look at another view

of it which is it's symbolic view and the Montessori game we're playing here is that here is where the kids main pay

off an interest is and what we're trying to do is show them builder an intuition

as to how powerful it is to be able to have some symbolic ways of expressing

behaviors of these things so if you look at sketches heading over there let's

call it car click on this little caret

so the number starts counting up the car starts rotating and again if I rotate it

with my hand the number goes positive and negative so these are two views of

the same thing here's a car Ford by five so I'll click on the exclamation point

car turn by five then things get fun

when you can just drag out these little

behaviors and it makes a script for you and you can just start the script going

and all of a sudden I've got a basically

Seymour's logo turtle circle we're the

costume on it and this costume is very important for many of the kids because

it enables them as bran Ferren was pointing out it enables them to get into

this stuff into their personal story about something they want to do like being able to drive an adult

car okay so then then what we want to do is

to make a steering wheel for this this

is like old time Lego and in that the system the system doesn't know that I'm

making a steering wheel I'm just making a drawing as far as its concerned let's

say keep same deal with a steering wheel I can look at its interface looks

exactly the same because the DNA is the same I'll call it steer and it has a

heading as well and now undo an

experiment with driving this car so let me click this number down here to zero

and I see the car is going straight and if I go negative the car is going the other way so if I can put positive and

negative numbers in here I should be able to steer this car around and steers

heading there is generating positive and negative numbers as I turn the steering

wheel so why can't I just pick up the name of those numbers and drop them

right into this little script and now

can I control the car by driving the steering wheel and I can the kids love

this for about 30 seconds and they complain they say wow this is - this is

great but it's too hard to steer and we say yes because you made a race car they

say what's a race car and we say well there's no gears between the steering wheel and the front wheels and kids say

well what's the gear we say look at this little triangle here press on it and you

can go and do a little arithmetic let's divide the number coming out of the

steering wheel by three and now the car

should be easier to control and it is so

just to pause for a second the kids have learned a few powerful ideas without

even giving a name to them including why divide might be useful it's useful for

scaling things you have to realize that in a fifth graders life they've never

had a use for division think about it

you don't need it for dividing up M&Ms you do that by parceling them out one

you do Pizza cutting by I so nowhere in the the

fifth-graders basic way of meeting the

world do they need any of this stuff until they start using a computer the

computer is actually allowing them to make their toys behave the way they want

them to okay so let's stop this guy and

let's paint ourselves a road get a brown

road here now one of the things the kids

do is to make a game to put their car on

the road and see if they can keep the car in the road and they can make noises if their car is getting off the road and

they actually get a in one of the classes that it's used at the open school in Los Angeles they get a little

driver's license if they can keep their car in the road so this is the ultimate

enfranchisement in adult type activities but the next phase is what I'm going to

show you here which is I want to make a little robot car explore another

powerful idea so I'll repaint this car and I'll just give it a little sensor

and the sensors are just paint so this

car has a little sensor and now I want to make this robot car so look at its

viewer and first thing I know I want the car to do is to go forward and I want to

test the road so I get a test guy here

I'll look at tests in here here's a nice

test so I'm looking at cars color blue

which I'm going to use as its sensor and looking to see if I can see the road

which is this brown color and I know

that I am going to do a couple of turns

here but I'm not sure which way so I'll just drop a couple of these guys in here and let's think about it for a

second so if I'm following a wall and I bump into the wall I should turn away

from it and if I'm away from the wall like I am here I should turn into it so

says the no version of the thing is right car turned by five turned o'clock

was into it and I should make this guy minus five so I'll turn away to it when

I from it when I hit it and let's start that going and so this is a simple one

of the simplest feedback programs and feedback is an incredibly powerful idea

because it's one of the main ways that both nature in general and humans in

particular make progress when they don't have complete information so this gives

you a search and there are many different parts of the curriculum that we do that involve these feedback ideas

okay so I'll stop this guy and move it aside

now let's take a look look at another use of stuff here I'll spare you my

drawing these ants so I draw these two

ants with their legs in different positions and I drop them into a thing

called a holder and now I want to

program an animation here so I want the

car to look like something starts off

with car looking like dot because I haven't said what it should actually look like and let's look at this holder

here and here's the ant holders player

at cursor here's the ant right here so

let me drag that guy out and drop it in here so now I've got car look like holders player at cursor and if I click

once the car now looks like this ant now

I want them to look like the other ant and here's the control of the cursor in

this older and I'm just gonna say increased by one over and over again and if I start that

going I get my aunt animating so as many

different things you can do just with animation there and of course he's still

this guy here and we might ask what would happen if we turn on our road

following script here so I'll turn this guy back on and now we've got an ant

following a scent trail or something we

can make into a fish swimming upstream and so forth

okay turn these guys off so what I'm

doing is just taking you through some of these sort of first stage powerful ideas

I'll get rid of this road here and drop

this down there and now what I want to do is to see this guy first I'm gonna

make a particle system here

drop the ant in it take this little

script out here so what I'm going to do is again I'm gonna read repaint this ant

but this time I'm going to get rid of everything except the little blue dot here that gives me a little blue dot and

now let's program this dot to do

something so forward let's make it

forward by 15 so it moves pretty quickly and let's make it bounce off the walls

now I'm gonna these bounce will make a sound when it hits the wall I'm gonna go

to the teachers favorite sound which is

silence and you'll see why in a minute

so if I start this guy going just going

to bounce around here and now what I

want to make is a zillion of these so I need a copy command here and copy if it

I just copy it I'm just going to get a stack of these guys on top of each other

it's not going to look all that exciting so what I'm going to do is actually turn

the guy each time before I copy it and what shall I turn it with but I'll turn

it with a random number here some number

between 1 and 180 and then if I just hit

the exclamation point here I'll spritz a

whole bunch of these guys out there and so I get a little particle system okay

now I'll get my Little Miss million

things you can do with the particle system and I'm going to show you a couple of them later this one's kind of

fun here which is a Fineman motor so I

turn these guys on so this ratchet guy

is going to go one way when a blue dot

hits the red it's going to go the other way when the blue dot hits the green and

on average that's getting hit you know

see it's sort of tipping around a little bit but if I turn one of these guys off

it's the equivalent of putting the pawl in the ratchet so I'll do that

and now the pawl present prevents it from going clockwise I'm only going to

get counterclockwise so this is a thing that Feynman put in a paper called

there's plenty of room at the bottom where he's trying to explain how

everything interesting in most phenomena

including biology and chemistry ultimately depend on there being kinetic

energy from from heat let's take a look

at some of the kids so those are kind of four powerful things you can do right

away now when you look at kids projects you notice that a little different they

almost always put idiosyncratic art they

don't copy our art so here's Lauren has

fixed this thing so it warns her by

making she's much better at driving this

than I am but basically her idea is if this was giving her sonic warnings then

it would help her learn to drive the car right down the very center of the road

now these two girls were less on fitting than many of the other kids in the class

and the challenge here was to figure out a way of getting a car to drive a robo

car to drive down the center of the road these two girls came up with a truly

elegant solution and the way we explain these things to people on the internet

because everything I'm showing you here is directly Internet able and is going

out on our website called squeak land dot org we use these transparent

membranes here to overlay the kids program so when a teacher is reading us

they can come in and say oh yeah here's the car here's an explanation of it we

explain to the teacher why the program is elegant if it is elegant this one is

truly elegant because the kids realize that instead of having nested

conditionals that could be just three separate cases and the car this thing is

actually running right now but this conditional says don't run unless you're

on the road you're supposed to run on so if I pick it up and put it on the road

and notice that when it gets off the road it will not run until it's made the

turn and the car will still do the right

thing if this sensor hits all three things at once because the two the four

and the minus 4 will cancel out and the thing will just go forward so this is

when you see a child derive a program like this from scratch it's worth the 30

years because this is wonderful when they do it and it changed their entire

attitude as you might guess about whether they could do this stuff here's

another kid that realized that curser increased by one was wrapping around and

therefore you should be able to have as many frames as you want in the animation

and why not put faces on them here's

another kid who realized you should be able to do the drive a car and the

animation at the same time so here's a Superman animation here and here's his

foreword and he decided to put in a speed control so forward in the in the

joystick controls velocity and side by

side so he's got something more like a video game here and made a maze that

you're not supposed to bump into okay

now these when I said we have a magic

new art algebra this is partly what I

meant because we have been doing increase by all along increased by is

how you move around the physical world the all of these guys are vectors and

you're adding a little vector to them and so they move we were doing increase

by when we were doing animation but we're jumping from one part to another

in this holder structure and here we

have another holder structure that is actually holding sound so just to show

you a little bit so if you take out this magnifying glass you can see each one of

these things is a little guy like the like one of the ants and it turns out

that that sound synthesis is just moving

a speaker cone according to the height

of these separate guys so this very same animation

should work if I am moving the speaker cone instead of changing costumes so if

I turn turn this on so here's the the

real speaker cone is actually doing this but of course it's going so slowly that all you're getting is a deep bass far

far too low so what I want to do here is go in here and speed everything up by a

factor of 10,000 and play it Tom and I

can ask the question what would happen if I put 0.5 in here so it goes down an

octave and what if I put another number

in

oh the kids now realize that this little

number which is the rate of progress through there is the magic number that

they need for every note on the keyboard and so by making a little button that

has these magic numbers in there which they find out for themselves they have

suddenly made themselves a sampling synthesizer that works just the way the

Roland synthesizers do and you can combine this

into a really neat musical thing look at

the trombone sliders here when I move this this player when it comes to the

bring the trumpet into prominence here

actually used to play in a Dixieland band and I like flugelhorns so I'll go

in here and I'll change the trumpet

make the clarinet sound more like a clarinet I'll explain what I'm doing is

real-time FM being controlled

I'll stop this for a second well you can't hear a C in our head we can go in

here and it will be played if I play in

the score here nearer note I'll get the

whole chord

well that sounds almost dixieland but I know that this wants to be a seventh

chord so I'll just change this note in the court get the seventh chord

I'll change the rest of these guys

[Music] so the progression is now like this

started up again [Music]

please note these synthetic convers that the kids make can be inserted into this

and if you want to see what the little toy program for doing all of this is

it's these scripts so these 9 scripts are all that has to be written in order

to do this play environment ok science

is more tricky on a computer because you can lie on a computer and business

people do all the time you can have

inverse cube laws of gravity and so forth so in order to do the real world

we take a fake picture of the real world like this sketch of the Imagineering

building and we superimpose a movie on it so if I here's a one of our cohorts

here dropping a water balloon and it's

kind of hard to see what's going on even

in playing the movie over and over again but if we look at every tenth frame we

can see that something nonlinear is going on and one thing is that's

beautiful about having these pictures is that we don't even need numbers to

figure out what is going on so there's the height there's the distance between

the two balloons between those two frames and I can see right away here

that I somehow have to make this higher by some amount in order to get to the

next balloon and I somehow have to make

it higher by what seems to be about the same amount to get to the next balloon and if I stack these up and if I've done

this carefully enough here's my little incremental amount that looks like it's

the same so it looks like what's happening is the velocity is increasing at a constant rate each time interval

that I've been looking at here so in order to check that out we build build

ourselves a little model and again I

won't go through building the whole thing I've just

prepared a little set and the little

model winds up saying I want to increase this thing called velocity by minus one

so that's the constant amount over and over and over again so velocity will go

up uniformly and I want to increase the balloons position by whatever this

velocity is each time so the balloons position is going to change nonlinearly

and I can test that out by trying them both at the same time and I see my time

constant is off a little bit but I believe you'll trust me that if we

monkey with that number we can get them to match up completely and that allows

us to put gravity on objects of pleasure like a spaceship so if I start this guy

off with just the gravity going and try

and land them on the moon I get an explosion so I have a motor in here I

have something that will show a flame when the motor is on and I have something that will crash me if I don't

land at the right speed so now let's see

if I can fly this ship down but I have

to be careful because my motor is powerful

it'll come back sorry

so idea carefully not well now if my

blood is up

there we go all right could still play a

video game at sixty ok so here's another

kind of a feedback idea of more profound idea which is following gradients so we

have gradients here and here's a salmon smelling its way upstream so what it's

doing is it's comparing the brightness

under it to where it was last time and unless it's in an upstream direction it

circles until it finds a favorable gradient then it follows the gradient

here's a clownfish which wants to find its sea anenome by the gradient of perfume given off by

the sea anenome so that this is a radial gradient so I'll start him going and see

you need another strap this is kind of

like business you know they're following gradients but they don't have a strategy when the gradient runs out same thing

with the Sam and he's gonna circle around he's actually gotten close enough

to switch over to another brain module that will get him to nest in the sea

anenome okay now a little more science

diffusion it's really great if I had time I would do it in this audience

because I love big audience so we have to turn off the air conditioner but if you open a fairly powerful perfume now

you're seeing it going 60 times real time and to ask people to raise their

hands and they can smell it you get this beautiful diffusion wave going back into

the audience it will go at a different

rate depending on how hot the water is in here and now we're using a sort of a

much more powerful built-in particle system that we derived from Mitch

Resnick starlogo stuff so here's the water particles and here's the dye

particles and this is a very very simple

little program for each guy which is to be bouncing randomly off these guys and

we see what happens as we get disorder the starts becoming quite uniform

and that's a very nice motivator for thinking about what might be going on

down there now if we combine gradient following we can do some really cool ant

stuff so we have about 50 ants here these guys are food and the ants go

about randomly until they find food they pav food they will go towards the nest

and leave a pheromone trail behind and

notice the pheromone trail organizes the other ants as they wander into it

because if an ant wanders into it and doesn't have food it goes upstream to find the food and then downstream to

find the nest and you can think of these

as fads so it's really quite interesting

to watch yeah so here we have quite a bit of activity and there's no food this

is kind of reminds me of investing the

excitement lingers long after the food

is gone so there are many beautiful

things you can do with these particle systems and fifth-graders have

difficulty with recursion like most of us and one of the interesting things you

can do with objects is you can do programs that would normally be done

recursively by making new objects that just do something once so to grow a tree

what you really need to do is just grow one branch and then make two buds and

tell them to do the same thing so if I tell this to happen a little bit of

randomness in there it's all done in parallel and over here we have it at a

much greater depth so it's actually putting out about 2,000 little particles

here a little randomness and you start

getting an idea that may nature though complicated is complicated

in a very special way it's not complicated the way we think most things

are complicated and therefore it can be understood in many important ways okay

now to end up look at our last particle

system example or lots of wonderful things you can do with kinetic theory of

heat and everything but suppose these are people and we're going to infect

just one of them and let the infection

spread get an epidemic people always

root for the last one there it is that's

life or death depending on how you look

at it hard to see what happened there so you want to get a little graph should

always do a few of those these things that have random behaviors

okay another graph here well so these

are characteristic curves of AIDS and it's quite interesting if we just change

the time constant by a little little bit here so the linear path along the side

is about half what it was if we started an infection here we see it happens

right away and we got something that looks more like typhoid with just a little change in the time constant and

the problem here is that unaided human

common-sense has a keyhole only about this big and if you look at aids with

normal human common sense it doesn't look like anything needs to be done

whereas if you come up here and look at typhoid you can see right away that

something needs to be done but science

can look at something like AIDS before it's truly dangerous and boosts our

common sense this uncommon sense of science is what allows us to imagine

things deeply enough to take action as though there was an actual epidemic and

that's important because actually 22 now

have died 35 million are infected in

some hair in Africa alone some people don't even still believe that AIDS might

be caused by a virus the politicians haven't taken action and

it's starting 70 percent of for instance

Botswana land is infected now 70 percent

so we're talking about to hala costs already and probably five or six more

hala costs to go before this gets controlled and yet it was controlled

very well in the countries that had science because they knew that no matter

how long the time constant is that when you have a deadly disease that is

contagious and incurable you're going to get an exponential curve that is going to be very very dangerous and

so I've ended where it began which is if we want to have a great future

let's send children to make that great

future that think a heck of a lot better than most of us do today thank you

a good night okay

Allen I'm sorry to say that you did not break your 30-minute record here today

so I have time for one question Kay's

first law that I've read about is that the best way to predict the future is to

invent it I've heard that yes and Kay

second law is as I understand it is that to win big you have to invent something

that creates a need and then fills it

what is Kay's third law and while you're at it what's your fourth fifth and sixth

was well I don't believe in laws because

that's the whole pink plain blue plain thing is the idea is to try and break

the ones that don't make any sense so principles I've just tell you that

Bob warned me that he was going to ask me this question but the answer popped

into my mind and I think it drives out of this this talk that when you have an

idea and it's not a great idea try

taking a nap rather than action because

as I look around where we are right now no vandalism is throwing a brick through

a window because you can and what I see in our society is inverse vandalism

which is making things just because you can so most of the things that are made

are if you go to a flea market you get a strong sense of this that it's

unbelievable to realize that almost everything in that everything in that

flea market some one or two or in people

had to desire it so much that they went through the labor of designing it and

building it and putting it out there and

so I think the I think the idea of especially in computer science where the

incremental change is kind of the black hole of every programmer I think much

more design before the programming and

much more elevated view of what's trying to be accomplished given that nobody's

figured out a way to put a half-life on code tends to stay around and I believe

that my friend Bill Buxton is going to talk quite a bit about the

importance of design in the next talk thanks so much

I