Alan Kay Squeak Presentation (2000)

I shall pay in person but our entire

group is over in Europe attending an object-oriented programming conference

first I thought I would have to cancel but I really wanted to make a

presentation at this meeting so I thought might be a good idea if I

captured a talk that I gave just a few

days before we went off to Europe to the

National Academy of Sciences it's not exactly the same topic as I was going to

talk about at this meeting and after the

talk I will be available by teleconference for questions so thanks a

lot and here we go very happy to be here

I have a theory why the two country

countries that have McDonald's haven't gone to war I'm I think it has to do

with the fat content [Music]

the the name of my profession is computer science but of course it's not

a actually a science it's more of a kind

of an unholy combination of mathematics and engineering the reason it's not

quite a science in the in the usual sense is that quite a bit of science is

analytic that is we're presented with nature and we try and find out how

nature works and one of the ways we've found out how to do it is to try and

take it apart and make models of it and

on the computer you is basically synthetic so we actually have something

like a dynamic mathematics and we create

things by making mathematical models of

them and then the computer carries them out and so it's not exactly clear what

it is that you're when you find out things in computing it's usually either

something that's like mathematics or like engineering or both but in spite of

that I'm actually here to talk to you about science I think Bruce invited me

to give this talk because I've been involved in trying to help children

learn powerful ideas for many many years

and a lot of the work that I've wound up doing with computing has come out of

this interest in children now to give

you an idea of or maybe a motivation for

some of this I like to show you a little clip that NSF the National Science

Foundation took at Harvard University a

self-proclaimed great American

University and I think it is - about eight years

ago I guess it is now so this is at graduation and the seniors had just

flipped their tassels and we're hugging each other and NSF went around with a

camera and asked these poor graduated

seniors a few simple questions about science so let's see what happened to

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 producers cover the

weather and that's 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 round 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 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 what 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 seasons 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 this is a beautiful you can imagine

wonderful we can see that the real curriculum at Harvard must be confidence

101 is that not one of the people

students or faculty who are interviewed ever said I don't know or I'm not sure

or I've heard that and we actually have

to be eternally grateful to all of them for not actually being able to remember

the answer which would have rented this a null experiment because almost

certainly they wouldn't have understood the answer but fortunately they didn't

even remember it so we got this nice nice result and I kept on waiting in

this video for the NSF people to ask what I thought was the next logical

question but they didn't but it happened I had to give a talk over at UCLA a few

weeks after I first saw this and the audience happened to be mostly

graduating seniors and a few first-year graduate soon so I invited them outside

after my talk and to come up one by one and let me interview them on these very

two questions and I was quickly able to of course the question the next obvious

question for the proximity theory is well tell me this when it's summer up

here in the northern hemisphere and you happen to know what the season it is in

the southern hemisphere and everyone did they all knew it was winter and I

believe that the Harvard students were maybe as bright as the UCLA students I'm

sure that they knew this as well and then for the and I got but basically

about the same ratio I got about 95 percent who had serious misconceptions

about one or both of these and for the ones who thought that the earth was

casting a shadow on the moon to get the phases I asked them whether they had

ever seen the the moon and the Sun and the sky at the

same time and almost every one of them had and I asked him whether the moon had

ever been in phase and almost every one

of them said yeah yeah you know occasionally it's in fact it's always in

phase unless they're the opposite ends of the horizon and in both of these

cases there was sometimes a very long pause after they had elicited this

knowledge that they had inside of them to realize that this very knowledge that

they had contradicted the theory that they had just come out with so so I

believe that this is not a science problem that we're seeing here but a

math problem you know in the sense that they had contradictory information

interestingly enough we're not asking for an analogy here either right that's indexed by the same terms

both worse index by seasons of both our

index by phases of the Moon but these pieces of this video that NSF did is

called private universe so that everybody's living inside their own

little universe but even worse it's a it's a property of the way the human

memory and learning works that we tend to compartmentalize knowledge even when

it has indexed the same way so these things are little isolated things and

the the thing that's most resembles our stories and proverbs and the way

proverbs work if you come home from a trip and your significant other is

really glad to see you then what's the

proverb for that absence makes the heart

grow fonder but what if you come home from a trip

and your significant other is not all that happy to see you out of sight out

of mind so this is why most societies

that rely heavily on proverbs are not literate societies because when you

write them down you discover that every proverb has an anti proverb

or there is a proverb for every case and this in fact is what we find in the

Bible that people who use the Bible mm-hmm

almost never read it sequentially but they dip into it for residence and this

is the way we use stories the movie that you loved last week could contradict the movie you

loved today and you don't feel any real problem with it because it's the

business of a story to be a little world in itself and our brains are set up to

learn things in terms of these little nuggets case based reasoning this is why

engineering by the way has been around for a lot longer than science because

you don't have to worry about contradictions to do engineering each

piece of engineering knowledge in the old days before the Scientific

Revolution was a kind of a cookbook and was kept as kind of a cookbook this is

how we learned how to do this and this is how we learned how to do that and so forth so so there's an interesting

problem and I've been interested in this problem for a long time now as mentioned

in the bio back in the 60s I was very

interested in what is it were now called

personal computers this in fact is the first not the first personal computer

that was done by a friend of mine a few years earlier but this is the first one

to actually be called a personal computer and people asked us what we

were doing we used to say well we're making a personal mini computer and that

got too long to be says and this is a picture of it on its own display so you

can see what personal computer looked like back then and we like tablets and

it had multiple windows and it I had

clipping and it had a kind of an iconic interface and so forth so they had a lot

of things that are in the technologies of today and it was partly influenced by

the first pen based system which you may not realize goes back even earlier that

the tablet actually was invented the same year as the mouse in 1964 and in

the ARPA community both of these devices were used quite a bit and so this this

system I ran with one user on a mainframe that

was quite a maybe about four or five times the size of this auditorium and

what we were trying to do is say okay now let's make something for one person

that has this kind of interaction in the summer of 68 I saw this tiny little

one-inch square first flat-screen displayed on the University of Illinois

and we started thinking about gee we

know how many gates are in this desktop machine I wonder when we could put all

of those gates this is about maybe two cubic feet of silicon in this desktop

machine put out a lot of heat had a fan

that was likened to a 747 taking off was

a desktop computer if the desks were made out of steel but when we saw this

we started thinking about gee I wonder when we could put that circuitry on the

back of a display and the answer was at

least 10 years out Moore's law was known about that it was first articulated in

1965 but 10 or more years out I was only

28 and 10 years was and was an infinity so I wasn't interested but a few months

later I visited seymour papert's first work with logo and children and here is

what I saw here's a little program that

papper could get people to do and did it

by getting the even kids as young as

five years old to do the following thing close your eyes make a circle with your

body and when the kid was about halfway around Seymour would ask the kid what

are you doing and the kid would say oh I'm going a little and turning a little

over and over again and so in logo two

circle means repeat which means do it over and over again go forward a little

turn riedel over and over again and what you get is

this nice little thing and my background

is mentioned was in mathematics so I looked at this thing and I thought wow

now of course I knew all about this but what pepper was showing us was that a

kid's toy that was actually doing differential geometry not even crass

cartesian stuff but this turtle is an actual vector in a different in a

differential geometry space the actual scientific language of much of physics

and I just went bananas I thought this

is the best idea anybody ever have for what computers should be turned into

which is an actual Montessori

environment so on the on the way back I

on the plane I started thinking about a computer for kids and made this

cardboard model in 1968 because it couldn't be a desktop computer for kids

would have to be something the kids could take around it would have one of these flatscreen displays on it and it

would be something that had authoring as symmetric as consumption so it'd be a

thing that kids could learn things by making them and it would be a Montessori

kind of environment a Montessori idea was that children in the in the natural

state in traditional societies are set up to learn the place they're in through

making up games imitating adult behavior through games

and she said if we want them to grow up she said in the 20th century if one of

them to grow up in the 20th century instead of the eleventh we have to give them 20th century or 21st century places

to learn by playing and so this is what caught my imagination that there's a

possibility of making a medium and not

just a medium a meta medium one in which Nuuk descriptions generate new

interesting thing that the children could learn powerful

ideas on it happened that very summer we're also about maybe 60 of us in the

ARPA community we're also starting to design the ARPANET which by the way

started working the next year so the the Internet is actually a little over 30

years old now had its 30th anniversary

last year in September and we realized

that we were going to have something like the printing press that could spread ideas all over the world in this

new dynamic form and so we had the sense

of a progression from these really expensive manuscripts of costing

millions of dollars in today's money to Gutenberg Bibles which tried to imitate

them as much as possible but only cost sixty thousand dollars in today's money

you might ask how does he know that Gutenberg Bibles cost sixty thousand

dollars well at the Nuremberg Book Fair they marveled about two things one was

how alike the twenty four Gutenberg Bibles that were displayed there were of

course they were exactly alike except for the illuminations which were done by

hand so that people wouldn't be afraid of them they wanted them to imitate

these old ways and the other thing was that these things only cost three years

of a clerks wages which is about sixty

thousand dollars which is nothing so you can think of this as kind of a maybe a kind of a mainframe a couple of million

bucks and only the Catholic Church or somebody really rich like the brother of

the King of France could own it this is kind of a work station then eldest came

along about 50 years after the printing press with these books that are the size they are today I wonder if anybody in

the audience here knows why books are this size today is sort of a standard

book size it's a really wonderful story that Aldous was a scholar who decided to

set up a press in Venice and his his I

meet his new idea was what he called the portable library so he decided the first

40 titles that his press printed were

called the portable library and they were not religious texts and the reason

the books are the size they are today is that in 1495 Aldous went out unto the

streets of Venice and measured people's saddlebags to see what was the smallest

saddlebag that was kind of common and he decided he would make his books fit in

that now when you see a book you'll never forget why they're that size so

Aldous hay and Elvis's books only cost a few hundred dollars in today's money so

they had a much smaller types size he had to invent new fonts that were

readable and so forth but then the interesting thing to me about the

printing press was that the big payoff on the press lagged by a hundred two

hundred and fifty years the big change

from it came in a change in how people represented ideas and argued about them

this happened in the 17th century and then politically in the 18th century and

so we had the sense that if the computer networked through what's now the

internet was going to have a significant change to humans that we'd all be dead

by the time this interesting thing happened because our belief was that

people would just try and basically do the Gutenberg Bible over and over again

it was to imitate old forms for a long

long time and so the question was can we actually speed this up and this is what

we tried to do at Xerox PARC was to actually try and guess what the media of

the 21st century would be like and to do it early and it's led to a lot of

technology most of which I think is recognizable the forerunner of both

workstations in the Macintosh from 1973

the laser printer object-oriented stuff

the Windows interface many of the software the Ethernet was done there and

pierre-pierre and client-server architectures and so we're kind of

aiming somewhere between this desktop way of looking at things and this new

laptop and I turned out there was a wind up

being an awful lot of work just to get a few computers into schools because that was what most of this technology was

designed for it was an effort to get

something that the screen had the shape of this eventual notebook computer that

we could make enough of them we eventually made about 2000 of them in the in the 70s so that we could get them

out to people who are not computer people and start learning about media

okay and so this is kind of a metaphor for what we had and had in mind there

and I'll show you a some legacy from the

past and also some modern versions so you might notice that this is actually a

Macintosh hardware I'm using but no

piece of Apple software is running on it right now or has been through the entire presentation so what I'm actually using

is a what you might call a 21st century

version of the software we did at Xerox PARC so they'll give you a kind of a

glimpse and the main difference between what I'm showing you now and then is

that there's now enough bits to be able to do color so we only add black and

white back then but now we have color but pretty much like for instance this

is the here's a Scientific American article I wrote about this subject it's

written in the very first desktop publishing system going back in the 70s

you notice it's pretty smart can feel the text that I'm putting stuff in and

here's a little flap of tools you know I'll drop paint palette in there and it

gives me an onion skin in case I want to trace something out I'll just do a corporate logo

and as soon as the thing I paint it

actually becomes an object that has a shape that's recognizable by the system

and it can feel it can feel it and the

system has a kind of a standard way of

being used here so that when I drag through texts it understands that I want

to select something but because this is a system also for kids we've made it D

constructible so there's a fence that

keeps the kids from getting hurt but they can climb the fence whenever they

want and these dynamic relationships are actually maintained so if I scroll this

guy you can see it's scrolling through that thing that I took apart okay so

that give you a kind of an idea there

and we'll look at a couple of other things just to give you an idea one of

the nice things about being at Disney is you they're all these artists around so

this is an example of two-dimensional media and there's some special things

about it for instance here's a bitmap version of this poo which in 32-bit

graphics is actually 41 K so he's actually kind of big and he has a couple

of bad things happen he goes up to about 500 K here and I make him big and it

gets Jaggi so both of those are bad in fact bitmap graphics are not really what

you want when you're dealing with the Internet let's take this guy out of here

the identical poo and let's ask him how

big he is and he says oh I'm only a K long okay big and if I blow him up then

something interesting happens is that he always stays at maximum resolution and

if I ask him how big are you now he says

I want to still only a K by long so this is this is an audience that can actually

understand this this is like writing a circle is all the points equidistant

from a given point on two sheets of paper and giving them to two people and

saying make one that's six inches in diameter make one six miles in diameter

in the description say is the same size so this poo was drawn by an artist but

it's captured and render it into a resolution independent mathematical form

and you can sort of just to give you a

sense here I'll pull out my little magnifying glass here and you can

compare the two edges you can see that this this edge here is feathered as well

but it's feathered in a way that's always dependent on the on the actual

pixel size that's there remember I said

this is a meta medium and everything that's in a computer is created out of

these new what you might call new mathematic description so there's also a 3d system

in here and all of these systems are scriptable so for instance I can come

down here and say the bunny move forward good an undo here turn your head around

once here's a crowd-pleaser which is

always look at the mouse and the 2d

world and the 3d world are mixed in this system so you think of what we have here

is a desktop but member the bunny is in 3d and the desktop is usually in 2d and

this system you can this shows you kind of what the relationship actually is

that the desktop is kind of a place in a in a larger 3d world now let's look at

the age kids that we spend most of our time with we work with thousands of kids

since about 1973 and partly for reasons

that you saw in the Harvard video we found that basically trying to up in a

sense update Montessori with

environments that involve science and math toys is a very very good idea

because Montessori point which Piaget later took up is that young kids are

actually not in great shape for learning adult math but they're in great shape

for being taught uncommon sense so they

pick up a set of heuristics and points

of view and ways of looking at the world and ways of thinking about knowledge

from their travels in the world and these are what are so disastrous for

these Harvard kids and most kids and if

you trace it back there's a famous book called science learning by Roger Freitag

as a New Zealander that the attitude

towards how the world works is firmly set in most kids by around the age

age of seven or so so over the years we've gotten very interested in working

with young kids and we're interested in

how why do kids build things small

percentage of kids get interested in ideas and build things because they're

intrinsically interesting and these kids are what you might call experimental error for pedagogical experiments so if

you teach programming in a classroom or almost anything in a classroom about

five percent of the kids will be somewhat pre-wired if you do sports in a

classroom about five percent of the kids will be pre-wired usually a different set of kids and for first couple of

years at Xerox PARC we used to only

point at these kits look at what this kid is doing it's incredible so a couple

years later we discovered that our pedagogy was actually meaningless

because these kids would have learned if we were twice as bad as we were they

just got a fact they were like us everybody in my group had understood

what a computer was and had learned how to program in about a week because it

was just there it is so it couldn't be more obvious so the interesting thing

about pedagogy for any of these areas like math and science and programming is

what do you do with the next to 80% the 80% who aren't pre-wired for the stuff

but can learn the precursors of this stuff and then be able to do it so this

is where we discovered our pedagogy was pretty bad so here's here's my nine-year-old nephew constructing a very

complex thing from standard Lego blocks which is actually a walking dragon so

it's standard Lego blocks articulated and it has motors it has a couple of

worm gears in here it took this kid 55 minutes of deep concentration to build

this and he had four times when he ran out of short-term memory and got

confused he had actually not made a mistake but he thought he had I'm sure

you've had this experience when dealing with children and so the coaching job

was just to get him to slow down Woori go back reconfirm that everything

is going alright and a lot of the reason this kid who is not particularly

intrinsically interested in ideas does things is because he's trying to prove

to himself and everybody else that he's in the world he wants to be an effector

he wants to be enfranchised like adults

so he always wants to do the driving and he likes to drive when he's on on a

computer so here's an interesting little activity which overlaps with what I just

showed you from Seymour for this kind of kid who's not particularly interested in

turtle graphics but loves the idea of designing his own car again we have this

little painting system yeah do the car of your choice as seen from the top and

since I've come to Disney I've learned to do specular reflections because

everything should Sparkle and

interesting both boys and girls these days invariably put big off-road type

wheels on their cars this is a very interesting thing because they're

interested in power so again this makes

the system makes this into an object and

I can do things to the object and here's the game we're playing this is the area

this hand eye areas where the kid gets their payoff and what we're trying to do

without telling them we're teaching the math is to get them to understand the

power of symbols so we have two

identical representations here to make this a little bit more clear I'll call

rename this guy car and if you look here

cars heading is 0 it means it's pointing straight up if I take this little blue

handle and rotate it you can see it going positive and negative in fact if I

go over here to the carrot and start pressing on it the car will rotate so I

have two identical use but one is symbolic and one isn't so

the symbolic one is not very interesting to the kids even when you can press on

the explanation point here and get it to go forward by five or turn by five still

not to any interesting but when they find out that you can just drag out

little pieces of program here and start

it ticking and the car starts going and

in fact you can here's a nice little

motor sound more like if of course

you're not driving it yet so we should do an experiment here first paid

ourselves

and ever the steering wheel is the same kind of thing as the car is I call it

steer here and it has a headache and it

goes Pleasant - when I turn it so let's see what happens to the car when I say

turn by zero well it starts going

straight and when I say turn negative it starts moving the other direction so it

seems like if I could get the numbers from the steering wheel into this car

turned by I can do that by grabbing this and just dropping it in then the car

should feel the steering wheel and I should be able to drive the car by turning the steering wheel the kids love

this and then they start complaining they say wow this is hard to control we

say yeah it's because you made a race car you don't have any ears between the steering wheel and the car and they say

well what's it here you say we'll see this little triangle here once you press on it you can do some arithmetic

arithmetic ah they say but we say just

divide that number coming out of the steering wheel by three oh yeah it's

much easier to control because now I have to turn the steering wheel three

times this far

those little activity goes on and on and then I could do all of it for you but

just to give you an idea and you'll recognize the seymour papert turtle here

but now with a costume that is meaningful to most

children and the next thing they do like

you can see over here as they draw a road I'm gonna draw a road in a in a

second also the cars can sense the

colors underneath them so they can make rude noises when you drive off the road and so the kids spend about ten minutes

doing this and I have about an hour of

playtime or something when you ask them what was the most fun thing about this

project they say learning to drive the car if you ask them what was the most

difficult thing about this project they say learning to drive the car so but

what they are getting a sense of is the power of having names for things and

also for the first time at least in America for nine and ten-year-olds while

you might ever want to use divide because if you think about it in a kid's

world they don't need divided for dividing up M&Ms because you just do

them sequentially they don't need divided for dividing up a pizza because you do that by eye so what does a nine

or ten-year-old actually use divided for and the answer is nothing and most kids

go all the way through high school without ever realizing that multiplication and division are for

scaling things and that there are many important uses of this okay so let me

let me show you it instead of taking that path let me show you another

powerful idea here I'll draw draw a

little road

okay and now what I'm interested in is

making this car a little smarter so this is usually at the end of several weeks

of experience with this thing so what I'm going to do is I used to sail boats

so the way you remember a port and starboard is that port and left in

English have the same number of letters so port is always on the left hand side

and it's red because of port wine is red

so put into my little red a little red

guy as a sensor and then starboard is

all the other things that's green and on the on the other side okay so here's my

car now it has has some sensors and now

we have to think about how we would

program this first thing we want to do is get rid of this car turn by the

steering wheel so we'll put this in the thing there and the car is going to go

forward where we're gonna make the motor sound so we'll just leave this script alone now what I'm going to show you is

something I think is very interesting the standard way a computer scientist

would go through the next phase is to do a nested conditional so they'd say if my

red sensor is touching something rather than do something else if my green

sensor is touching is a typical thing this is the way we wrote it this is the

way the teacher wrote it now it happens that this teacher is a wonderful teacher

she doesn't show the kids her solutions so she showed them a car successfully

doing working the road with two sensors but she didn't show them her code she

said this is a challenge so this is one of the this is the how the monkey found

the fifth way out of the room it turns

out that the kids these age really can't do nested conditionals it's too

complicates it's hard for a lot of us to react so remember these things so here's

what a number of kids did on this and I

think you'll find this interest I hope so so let's get a new script here

and we'll put a test in it and what

we're going to do here is we're going to

pick a color on the car so we pick we're

going to pick the red the actual red that I used here that one and here we're

going to pick so we're going to say when red sees brown what do we want to do we

can see that the car here if the red sees brown then we want to turn away

from it and the kids use a clockwise

system here so we're going to turn by

minus five okay and then one more little

script here and same basic idea color

C's get the conditional first by the way

this this way of letting the kids do these things without having to type is

actually very important because it allows them to do many many more

experiments so in this case we're going to pick up the green color I used here

that one and again so when the green guy

sees Brown this Brown what do we want to

do well in this case if we see it then we want to turn away from it so let's do

car turn by five let's slow it down down a bit so we can see what to do with it

like that get this guy to be paused and

get this guy to be paused and let's let her go

very quickly some of the kids decided wow you should add some sounds in here

cuz then we can say so let's pick will

do clink for read novel

let's do scratch okay so now let's go

okay now what happens here is some of

the kids realize hey wait this is what ants do and they follow trails and this is what salmon do and they're fine

so immediately some of the kids go and redraw the car which they can do by just

going to that and turn the car into a

fish or turn the car into an animal and so one branch of this is to go into

biological systems so shown you three of

four of the powerful ideas we work with I've shown you vectors shown you

basically differential equations in their computer form and the integration

of them I've shown you feedback systems which is how how you do things without

now notice that elegant this code is by

the kids know what computer scientist is just not used to writing parallel code

so we would never think of doing it this way but when I saw this program from the

kids I just about wept it was just beautiful because they realize that

these cases were independent and therefore they could just let all three

scripts run without needing any synchronization except these tests and

the rhapsodies of a computer scientist

let me show you the fourth thing that we

do here I'll skip past this

this is actually a system that older kids construct it's again lots of little

cars running around and bouncing off things and you can do for older kids you

can do gas laws and other kinds of things and here we're going to do

something else we're going to infect one of them the red guy and let him infect

other everybody always routes for the

last one there he is and to help us

understand what happened we get a curve like that and that just happens to be the characteristic curve of an AIDS

infection it has this long flat period

where nothing much happens and to contrast that we can heat up this

particle system here by just making it smaller and we'll do it again and we get

this which is a lot more like typhoid and cholera and I think everybody in

this room realizes that more than 30 million people in Africa alone are

infected with this disease needlessly

and this is because the unaided human common sense is a keyhole that's only

that big and so if you look at AIDS when

it's starting up with simple common sense nothing looks bad whereas if you

look at typhoid or cholera is starting up you can tell you should probably do something and the whole point I believe

of learning the scientific outlook besides the fun of science itself is

this larger window for imagination it allows us to imagine disasters early

enough to take action and that's what happened in this in this country ok so

now the last part of this I just want to show you following one of these powerful

ideas which is called increase by

start with very young kids like six years old this kid has drawn a grasshopper here

and has made some grass and the the

grass here we can copy

we can make a lot of copies of it and

hide this little grasshopper now six year olds it's an interesting thing

about what can what can six year olds actually do here and see if I can find

the grass up or here come on here it is

but a very wonderful little game can be made with increased by so I've take the

hoppers right left coordinate I can determine that that's the right left

coordinate by getting a little watcher

for it and I can try moving this grasshopper around and see what happens

to it so going this way it gets in it increases so I cover it up again with

with grass and then I write a little script here let's do hopper increased by

one and now I can bring my mother over and say what's hiding in the grass mom

and the mom says I don't know and the kid says hey watch this I think

biologists here for sure know that there's a huge difference between the

motion sensors in our visual system and our ability to recognize patterns we

have special wiring for dealing with these things and this is something that

now becomes part of this very young kids common sense what about animation we get

the kid to draw a straight arrow here

draw a curved arrow and what we want to

do is alternate back and forth between this and have this guy where where the

costume so how do we do that

okay what we do is again right when a

little program and now what we're going to do is increase not how this thing is

moving we're going to increase where this cursor is in the structures are

going to say cursor increased by one and when I'm step that alternates back and

forth and now all I have to do is to

come in here and this actor on the stage

is called Harrison I don't want him to look like a dot I want him to look like

the value that's under the cursor and

now if I say step but if I tell it to go

I get a surprise it actually goes too fast so one of the things I can do here

is use this little green copy guy to

copy more in now I get a nice animation

and I can see that I'm spending three-fifths of my time on the straight

arrow and to end two fifths of my time on the curve there and that's giving me a nice animation so this is kind of

standard animation but here's another experiment I can do what happens if I

change this number here to 1/2

and what is actually happening there well let's let's take a look this is a little complicated here so I should get

a watcher here oh yeah so it's four then

four point five and five and five point five then one and then one so it's

dwelling for two ticks on each one of

these things and and therefore it is traversing through there at half speed

so this is teaching the kids sampling

same program works with a multiple thing so here's this bird and learn to draw a

little bit better pause this guy so

he'll just stick here and again we can

do these experiments we can try let's go up to two here so now he's just

eliminating these guys because he's hopping over them or I can come back to

my 0.5 experiment I can go in my

supplies flap here and I can get out of slider

and if we look at the slider we see that

its minimum value is zero and its maximum value is one its current new

valent numeric value of zero point three so whenever I just pick up the slider

and just plug this in here and now I've

got a continuous control over the speed of this thing okay so this one I'm just

going to point to just the point this is exactly the same as the animation except

we have a timer that we have recorded and when I say go through it it's going

through the air and then the cone position of the speaker is being moved back and forth again I can speed it up

by a factor of 2 and a factor of 3 it goes faster but I can't hear anything

that's the reason is is that I have to actually speed it up here by a factor of

10,000 to go through and if I go up to a

factor of 2 okay so that kids take these

things make up the magic numbers and now now they have the magic numbers to

sample out the different notes put each one on a button and now they have a

little synthesizer

and there's a trombone in there it gets

louder when I bring in more if I don't

want to try but what if I want this little time where I just made so every

sound the kid makes is inserted into

what you might think of as the adult media here except this is all done for

children okay so I think it's a good

place to quit what I've been the next

stage in this increase by is to do

gravity experiments and the way we do science is by actual reference to the

real world I don't believe you can learn science from a book because you you can

write lies in a book I don't believe you

can learn science on a computer because the computer can simulate an inverse cube law just as easily as it can

simulate an inverse square law so you're always basically put in the position of

having to believe somebody in mathematics Einstein had this nice

saying he said you have to be able to learn how to distinguish between what is

true and what is real and what he meant is that what is true is what you can put

in language in mathematics that's because the truth comes from its non

contradiction stuff but what is true is

not necessarily what is real what is real is the way the universe wants to be

and they're really two different things and so we do it by actual references to

the physical world like somebody dropping water balloon and then having

the kid

measure using this little measure so for

instance if you measure from the middle of the balloon to the middle of the next balloon this is every 10 frames here

they quickly see that they have to increase this measure by some amount

each time

and then by stacking these guys up they say oh yeah the amount that's getting

increased is just about constant and

that leads them to this two-stage increase by which gives you gravity and

in the music world a two-stage increase by gives you FM synthesis which is the

synthesis that's used by the Yamaha synthesizer so the belief here and this

is justified by quite a bit of experience that simply putting kids into

a play world that has powerful things

powerful ideas that are used over and over again in different contexts that

these become part of the kids heuristic thinking and I believe that if we're

ever going to have more than a few percentage of the population really

understand science that that's what we

have to do we have to change kids common sense into uncommon sense thank you

Thanks so I should mention that this software I'm doing is free this is not a

Disney product Disney is sponsoring this research but it is actually an

open-source system like Linux done by a

small core group of seven of us at Disney and well if you count all the

people who find bugs for us probably several thousand people out in the

network all over the world in two or three hundred people who put in several

hours every day helping on this we've been working this runs on every platform

runs on little PDAs runs on phones runs

on the Sony Playstation 2 and it runs

exactly identically on each platform unlike we're not competing with Java but

if you've used Java you may be aware that doesn't necessarily run the same on

one platform to another so this uses some software techniques developed at

Xerox PARC to make it absolutely compatible and it doesn't use any native

tools so the graphics is exactly the same the 3d was being done by us all of

the sound was being done by us so it doesn't need sound cards or anything

else so it's kind of a universal software system that's freely available

over the internet and this media that I've been showing you every single thing

I was showing you is something that you would in essentially running out of a browser because once you find one of

these things in a browser it takes over the machine in a benign way expands to

fill the screen and it becomes a new world for you to do work in you can

escape from this world back to your the arms of the operating system you so love

but basically this attempts to solve a

whole bunch of problems of putting media out on the net and allowing it to be

used by anybody authoring is always on so when you're using this thing

regardless of whether you got it through a browser all the things that I showed you are working continuously you can

think of as an attempt to restore the symmetry between authoring

and consumption that we had in personal computing 25 years ago but got taken

away by the web the web has this horrible thing that the Brout web

browsers don't really want you to be an author and so you tend basically most of

the millions of people on the Internet are basically consumers not authors and we think this is just really bad goes

against everything that we tried to create 30 years ago so any questions

okay the the hackers version so I should

mention that this thing that I showed you is squeak org Suite org squ

EA k is the home site for this open

source project and all of the different

platforms are supported there this demo

was done by taking what you can download there and adding only about a hundred

lines of code to it so everything I

showed you is actually in there but none of the media is right now so for

instance the ability to make that car is in there but the project that's set up

to help you make the car is not in there but it will be by the end of the summer

so the reason I'm going around and showing this now particularly to

scientists is because you happen to be one of the major groups that we made the

system for it's for kids ultimately but we actually need thousand great pieces

of content like the drive a car and the maker robot car and they make your own

tomber and the stuff like this and we made this system is a kind of a super

hyper card if you will as an as an

authoring tool both for children but also for people who understand this

content to do free content there's

nothing in the license that prevents you from making money on this and some

people will some people will make money but this is basically an internet kind

of thing where the thing that children most need in this

country at least is something like the San Francisco Exploratorium which is 500

ways to enter into a single idea because

every child is different most children aren't interested in the ideas directly they're interested in

some part of their own personal fantasies and so when Frank Oppenheimer

made the Exploratorium he wanted to teach the children that the world is not

as it seems and every child was

different so he put 500 exhibits in the Exploratorium all of which teach the

world is not as it seems and he figured that if he had 2,000 kids careening

around the Exploratorium that the Brownian motion of these kids against

the 500 exhibits would often collide the right kid with the right exhibit and

they would have an experience now I'll tell you justice here's a here's how deep this

goes this feedback experience is a big

one for the kids just the idea that you can be strategic is a huge thing for a

nine-year-old child that you don't have to know the exact things you can draw

any path and their little robot car will follow it but here's a biggie

maybe even a bigger one because it's so tiny is that a girl was experimenting

with forward so she was doing forward over and over again forward five going

real fast forward - it was slower she clicked it down - forward zero stop she

went to the negatives and went backwards she went up - forward zero and then she

had this epiphany and that was that the car was still moving when it was at

forward zero that that zero was actually a valid way to measure a length that it

was actually something and it's just one of the great things when a kid has this

thing it's not nothing it's something

that's the reaction and so just in these

tiny ways every time you open one of those cracks a great thing happens

because there's a chance for more stuff to come in and I believe that's an essay at least

in this country what we need is a thousand or more pieces of cotton we

have people like Richard Dawkins who are going to do some things and Douglas Adams who wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to

the galaxy you're going to do some things in this is really for the the

scientists and knowledgeable people of the world who are interested in kids to

make a little project that will help

some kids understand a powerful idea so

that's the plan yeah why I don't know

what you mean by the same playground there well we're the it recapitulates

everything you can do on a personal computer that I'd say that's large right

I mean the computer has a lot of degrees of freedom and nothing is restricting

here this is not a stripped-down system that's the whole point of it you have to

have low threshold but you must not have any ceiling so the system is more has in

many many directions as much more capacity than the software you have on

your PC or Mac and it should because it was done it was the original software

for this stuff it was done with a much larger view than to provide stuff for

businessmen or people who want to imitate paper so I would say that it

it's a playground as large as what books are except its dynamic which is another

dimension to it and I don't believe that children are harmed by reading books just because they have characters on

paper every book is somewhat similar you must admit

Alan Kay Squeak Presentation (2000)

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