Alan Kay at the Getty Conference (1991)

Alan Kay is widely credited as the original designer of the Macintosh

computer the computer mouse and the graphical user interface what few people

know is that these designs were based on extensive research Alan did with

children at xerox parc in the 1970s alan

has a PhD in electrical engineering and is currently fellow at Apple computer

Alan is a pro professional jazz saxophonist and keyboard artist his

comments today will be based on his continued work with children in a school

in Los Angeles please join me in welcoming LMK

I love introductions because they can't

possibly be true so I actually was a

jazz guitarist many years ago well this

this talk I think will be very different from Lucy feldstedt's talk in that it

won't be a commercial for my company's equipment in fact having been a

technologist now for about 30 years I still don't think the computer equipment

is quite there yet and so a lot of the

preparation for it is a little bit like becoming a guerrilla warrior in the face

of something that is what you might call

inverse vandalism and when the when the kid through the brook the brick through

the window and the cop asked why said well because I could and a lot of

technology that is built today is because they can its inverse vandalism

so I like to start my talk off by giving

you three dilemmas which I think we have to worry about the first one is

something that could very well happen in a crazy place like California where we

watch MTV a lot the parents worried

because their children aren't getting to be musicians by the time they leave high

school and noticing that the Americans

are scoring eight out of ten countries with the Japanese of course being first

in music leaving high school start beating on the state legislature right

before a big election and finally the state senators and the legislature say

all right all right we have a solution for you we're going to put a piano in

every classroom

now unfortunately we don't have any money to hire musicians so what we'll do

is we'll give the existing teachers two-week refresher courses and music in

the summer that should solve it now as

any musician will tell you the music is not in the piano because if it were we'd

have to let it vote I work with many

teachers over the last 20 years and

almost without exception they really care about helping their students and

you can imagine some fifth-grade teachers with this new dilemma and

saying well we learned that C major scale thing this summer and if we taught

it to the kids some of them would do better than some of them would do worse and that would give us a nice bell curve

for grades in other words what happens

when the teachers really don't know what to do they come up with behavioral objectives

so the promise with problem with this whole scenario is that music an impulse

from within ourselves that can only be amplified by technology never gets in

the classroom I'll give you an example of their many interesting surveys about

music two of them are worthwhile looking

at one was done in the late 70s by lincoln center in new york trying to

figure out how they could get more people to come to concerts and wondering what kind of people came to concerts and

what kind of people didn't go to concerts and they did this extensive

survey and one of the most striking things about the results of this survey

is that the people least likely to go to a concert at Lincoln Center were the

people who as children were the audience for Leonard Bernstein's young people

concerts I was a teenager when he did

those and I remember them as being pretty neat these people could only

remember having to sit still for three hours somebody was up there talking they

just had to sit still and not fidget too much that was what music meant to them

so if you want to do something with

technology you have to find a way of

getting an impulse that the technology can amplify the other survey which was

done by casio before they got into the keyboard business they got into the

keyboard business because one of the four casio brothers is a pretty good classical pianist he wanted more people

to enjoy music the way he did his brothers made him do a survey

it's like what big companies do when they don't know what to do they hire

some consultants a consultant as a person who knows a hundred ways to make

love but doesn't have a girlfriend

so this casio survey which is done in

the early 80s came up with profiles of

people wanting to do more with music and so forth and one of the most interesting

one is that they discovered that the

nine out of ten people who had been forced to take piano as a child have

been turned away from music for the rest of their life so here's the technology

not being neutral not being an amplifier but being the other thing that

technology is the other side of the coin which is a kind of a prosthetic you put

an orthotic brace on a healthy limb and the healthy limb starts to atrophy the

piano without the musical impulse inside the learner atrophy is what interest

they might have because it removes the necessity for paying attention to a lot

of things like the pitch of the note so this is the first dilemma and it

basically says the first thing we have to do before we worry about technology

is we have to worry about what our value system is that I've worked in schools

for more than 20 years and I've never seen a successful school yet that didn't

have a strong parental involvement and I believe beyond all of this stuff the

values in the home are the dominant factor that no matter how great the

school is or how great the principal is it's the values in the home the if you

can get the parents into the school as some of the really good schools do so they can see what's going on so there's

an involvement it's really incredibly important it dominates all the other

things now dilemma number two is that

we're dealing with human beings here and I enjoyed Laurie Anderson thing but I

think the thing that she overlooked is that human beings break to we break them

every day in our cities we break them in the schools we bake them in lots of

different ways and one of the reasons we break them is because we don't understand them we have very old

comments it's ideas about how we ourselves work and how other people's work and how they

should be educated and in fact most of those models don't work very well so I'm

going to show you a slide of what we

should actually be thinking about and if we turn the slides on please so here's a

piece of technology if you want a screwdriver and somebody gives you this

you have every right to get angry they say what this is the functional part of

a screwdriver right you say but I want a user interface because it's the function

plus the user interface that makes a tool when I was making this slide I

looked at the screwdriver for the first time in a new way and I thought boy that

is a terrible design for a screwdriver think of it the mechanical advantage is

the ratio of the diameter of the handle to the diameter of the shaft it's small

best way to hold the screwdrivers like this but it slides off the screw if you

hold it like this you don't get enough purchase on it so I thought that is a terrible design for a screwdriver that

is the ms-dos of screwdriver designs

I didn't say I wouldn't do any anti commercial actually one of my hobbies is

building pipe organs and I have one of the great books about pipe organs as

part of d duros encyclopedia which is published before the French Revolution

was about two hundred and twenty years ago in there are engravings of the tools

they used and in there is an engraving of a screwdriver it looks just like that so this bad design has been around for

more than 200 years and people use it and learn it and get proficient in it

without ever thinking about it but if we tried to fit the screwdriver to the human then we might come up with

something different what should a screwdriver actually look like well it should have a very big diameter on the

handle we have to bear down on it and we

want to have as much friction as possible so what should the handle look like shook like a ball does anybody ever

seen a screwdriver like that yeah about five years ago somebody went through the

same thought process I did and said that is a terrible scootin I might not have might have compared it to kobol instead

of ms-dos but so he said well there's

actually a hand there there's a hand what an idea maybe we should fit

something to the the human who's going to use it and of course when we're

dealing with primates and we're trying

to communicate with them we have to find some of the modes of communication that

primates are willing to use and one of the ways you can do this is by making up

a representation system that is both familiar and elevating we happen to be

primates as well and so the kind of fitted pneus we need is something about

how the mind works and in fact

we don't know very well how the mind works so here's an example so take a

look at this face and see if you can see what's wrong with it besides that it's

upside down who can who can see mouth is

upside down what else the eyes okay

let's pretend we're in a the kind of school that none of you represent in

which knowledge is thought of as a fluid

that is transferred drop by drop from the full teacher vessel to the empty student vessel and that knowledge is

encoded into facts represented by language so let me give you a sentence

of fact about this picture and let's see if you agree and what we've done here is

we've taken the picture of a young girl we've extracted her eyes and mouth we've

turned them upside down put them back into the picture and then turned the entire picture upside down does

everybody agree with that isn't as an idea yeah okay so you should be quite

prepared for what it looks like right side up I'm going to turn this back

because I've discovered nobody will listen to it when it's on the other way

nasty nasty always doing things like so this is why mcdonald's hamburgers

doesn't run print ads saying that eating a mcdonald's hamburger will make you a

better looking person because in english it is absurd goes that statement goes in

through your ears goes to the left side of your brain is evaluated more or less

as a proposition and is rejected so what

companies like McDonald's do is to make an image showing good-looking people

eating hamburgers and all of a sudden it goes through your eyes to the back part

of your brain over to the lower right-hand side of your brain and you come up with a different inference a

weaker inference but the inference that the advertisers want you to have so the

important idea here is that not only do we not understand how human mentalities

work very well but in fact we don't have just a single way of dealing with the

world we have a body way of dealing with

the world we have a visual way of dealing with the world and these are

things that loosely Lucy mention in her

talk but here's the kicker if our

mentalities deal with the world differently then it's not enough to say

if we only hear if only remember twenty percent of what we hear and we remember

forty percent of what we hear and see that we should concentrate on the image

what if the really important stuff can only be learned through language should

we be concentrating on the image should we be turning people back into denizens

of the Middle Ages learning things by watching beautiful stained glass windows

that now move no we have to have a better model of how our mentalities work

in order to understand how to use images

how to use symbols how to use things that we do the first order theory

doesn't wash it's not good enough we

have to understand enough about what's going on so we can transmit the ideas of

our civilization in a way that doesn't dilute them down to make gibbering

idiots of the is so Piaget had a mental model it's one

that is used a lot actually doesn't work quite the way he thought it did but he

thought you sort of thought of as a caterpillar going towards a butterfly

you go through metamorphosis the most

important thing that I think the piaget pointed out is that kids are not damaged

adults in other words the purpose of

education is not to fix them so that they will then be good adults that the

stage pneus that Piaget noticed was different parts of the kid's brain

functioning in a coherent way but in a different way than adults do a more

interesting model was put forth by Jerome Bruner based on pjs and using

some of the same poj experiments here's

the famous water pouring one where you pour from a squat class into a tall thin one and the kid in the the visual stage

says there's more water in the tall glass I Brunner did something that

Piaget never thought to do which is again covered the tall glass so the kids

couldn't see it anymore and ask the question again the kid immediately changes his mind back and says but wait

a minute there must there can't be more water so Brunner takes the cardboard

away and then the kid says no look there's more water we're gonna puts the cardboard back and the kid changes his

mind again so if you have any six year olds you'd like to torment

now these results are not predicted by pjs stage model so Brunner came up with

a more interesting multiple mentality model which seems to be much closer to what's going on that we actually have

different mental centers you were reacting to two when I showed you the upside down faces and these mental

centers deal with the world in completely different ways they came about four different evolutionary

reasons and we have a very little

communication between the different ways of apprehending the world so the

simplest form of this is to think of ourselves as having a body centered way of dealing with the world a visual or a

figurative standard way of dealing with the world sometimes thought of as being

like right brain and we have a symbolic way of dealing with the world now

psychological theories aren't worth a hill of beans unless you can get some

ideas from them so here's one of the

things you can do with Brenner's theory suppose you're interested in getting

very young children to write coherent compositions and essays even though the

kids are at an age of say five as this child is isn't really very good at

sequencing this was done at the open school where we have had a project for

many years actually done before we showed up and one of the teachers

discovered that if you got the kids to make a storyboard so the kids actually

make the drawings on the left first because lo and behold the kids can

sequence visually even though they can't sequence symbolically yet in fact we've

done some experiments last year that showed that even preschoolers can do coherent stories if they have a

storyboard apparatus to help them then the kids can turn around and write

sentences that refer to each of the panels and we have given them a

structure that helps them organize something that they couldn't organize

before so is this a trick is this

cheating I'm curious is it you don't have to

agree with me okay I don't think it is because I think that our whole

civilization has progressed by changing

the representations that we use to deal with the world we have about the same IQ

we had 250,000 years ago imagine having

an IQ of 300 which has never been recorded on this earth and living

200,000 years ago what could you do or having one like 220 and being Leonardo

living three centuries before he could have the power to power the all the

things that he thought up you can have an incredibly powerful IQ and not be

able to do much with it because it is the representation systems that make us

powerful not our puny ability to think we have to have structures to deal with

and part of the aim of Education to me

is to try and give kids what Seymour Papert has called for many years

powerful ideas powerful ideas or things

that help you think stronger thoughts then you're able to think before okay

and well there's something else you can do suppose computers are hard to use and

you want to make them easy to use well why not appeal to the inactive the body

mentality because it knows how to move things around why not appeal to the

iconic mentality which can keep track of a hundred images at once can find the

picture of the elephant four times faster than the word elephant can

remember images for many years ago let's try and experiment how many people flip

channels on television how many people

have flipped into a movie they haven't seen for 20 years how long did it take

you to recognize that movie how long a few seconds right so think about that 20

years ago you saw this movie you're probably with a close personal friend

you didn't know you're going to be tested 20 years later randomly while

you're worrying about something else you flip into the middle of this movie and in the middle of it without any

preparation about 90 frames later you've recognized that movie how many people

knew what was going to happen next in the movie after they recognized the movie right that's a smaller number but

many people do think of what that means

the iconic mentality has a staggering ability to recognize places we've been

before but in order to make all this stuff work we can't get rid of the

symbolic mentality because the symbolic mentality which given the correct

context is the one took us out of the middle ages through the Renaissance and

gave us the civilization that we have today when it rules we lose it because

it separates us from the earth but if we throw it away in attempt to get back to

an image dominated way of thinking about things we give up our ability to deal

with the world so we have to balance these things in a very important way and

this led to this machine back in the in

the 70s which is the forerunner of the Macintosh we work with some three or

four hundred children and the result was this macintosh like user interface which

then got put on the mac and is proven so popular that is now spreading like

wildfire through various other manufacturers machines and the reason it

is is that it wasn't actually a random event it was based on a psychological

model of brunner's that actually did seem to have something to do with the

way people dealt with the world and we were able to give them an environment

that allowed them to make this formerly alienated world part of their own okay

so that's the second idea and the the

result of that is something like this

let's roll that first clip

so this is a 22 month old little girl this is taken by your father about five

years ago so she's two months shy of her second birthday and her mother is my

accountant and both her mother and father live at home and both of them had

Macintosh computers and when I found out the little girl was interested in

computing I gave her an apple to which she rejected she didn't know what it was

the important thing to realize is it for this little child this is not technology

because technology's all that stuff that wasn't around when you were born right

wrist watches radios all those things those aren't technology clothes language

they're part of the environment and as Montessori pointed out many years ago

one of the great geniuses of 20th century that one of our strongest urges

is to learn an environment so if you give people in environment they will

start learning it that's what she did now we never worked with a child this

young at xerox but it was wonderful to watch her confidently using this since

that now don't be impressed by this because she's already been using the mac at for about six months by the time this

was taken so so i thought okay i believe

that she's doing this but what happened next really surprised me she wants to save her what's a new sheet of paper

actually so she saves her drawing using the pop-up she goes to the pulldown to

get a new one and she's off and rolling

again so

it's one of those rare moments when the camera was running at the right time so

the idea we were so intrigued by this that we tried the little girl out on many different macintosh systems and we

discovered she was about seventy percent literate in this kind of interface if I

she could take a very hard application like aldus pagemaker desktop publishing

started up make marks and it print the marks out save the marks away get the

marks back couldn't read yet but she knew what all of the where all the

commands were about seventy percent of the things you expect from one application to another so by having a

psychological model that creates an environment that the person's inborn

drive to explore just as Montessori said

you can do incredible things okay so I'm

going to skip the next segment this is for the video people who have been yeah

there are people behind the curtain back here it's not all being run by computers

now here's our third dilemma third dilemma is that nothing is holding still

and one of the I was interested in the

references to McLuhan and the invention of the printing press and i happen to be

a big fan of McLuhan and one of the things that McLuhan pointed out about

when new media come in and take over for the old is that they don't know what to

do with themselves for 20 or 30 years

when Edison invented the motion picture camera in 1895 he thought the maximum

movie that anybody had ever show would be about six minutes long because I couldn't figure out what to do with it

the they had whole shots nobody moved the camera in shooting until nineteen

fifteen when DW Griffith did birth of the nation and he was the person after

20 years of movies being around was the person who invented the modern language

of film which involves montages and zooms and close-ups and tracking shots

and all the things that were used to today and McLuhan pointed out that was

exactly true for what happened after Gutenberg but the Gutenberg Bible was a

big heavy book the same size as the manuscript books handwritten by the

monks why was it the same size because they didn't know what size a book should

be so I said make it this size will imitate the script of the monks in the

the fonts that we have and that's what a book is a few years later the infamous

aldous whose last name by the way is not

pagemaker but that would be great if it

was but his name is eldest minus sheís

is a Venetian printer he came to several insights one is that people probably

wanted to read more than the Bible so he

and his sons went out and gathered up most of the extant Greek and Roman

writings of the day they published some 40,000 books think of what that means

from going from practically zero there are 390 books in the vatican library in

the year 1400 printing presses 1452

by the time Elvis died his company in Venice alone had put 40,000 different

titles the wealth of the ages so Aldous

in our Terms was the person who realized you needed a network right need access

to a lot and al just did something else

for which he will always be my hero he decided that book should be the size

they are today this size the reason he

decided they should be this size it's because that was the size that saddle bags were in Venice in the late 1400s

books could now be lost think about it

because they could now be lost they didn't have to be owned by institutions anymore you could take them with you

something disastrous could happen you just get another one that was a paradigm

shift and this forced Aldous become one of the first typographers these scripts

didn't shrink down very well and so Aldous had to invent a new formation for

alphabets based on Roman characters in

order to get legible type in these small books so that was a huge change now

where are we how many people would feel

okay if their computer I don't mean in the pejorative sense now but I mean in

the Senate our computers cost a few thousand dollars we don't want to be

lost we don't want something to happen it's not we don't go out to the store it's not like a digital watch that costs

1095 and we jump in the pool with it we are in the stage right after Gutenberg

right the desktop computers look just like time sharing terminals time-sharing

systems are the manuscript culture owned by big institutions the institutions

knew how you should do your religion they're always saying how you should go

along with them because they're big stuff desktop computing

I'm not really being that facetious

think about what the book actually meant to creating the individualized man of

the Renaissance where you could go away by yourself you didn't have to be

educated with other people if you didn't want you can go away by yourself and form your own opinion and then the big

revolution happened as Elvis and the other printers started spreading many

different ideas around the Catholic Church didn't even suppress the printing

press because they thought it was an automation of a process that they found

laborious they had no idea that it was

going to do them in no idea whatsoever

now the important idea here I think is to realize that we are we haven't had

our eldest we have we don't have computers that we can afford to lose yet

but we will before this decade is out and that will be a great an enormous

change in the way we deal with computing and it also means something else nothing

that happened between Gutenberg and Al discounted right that means every

thought that we think about computers today is likely to be totally wrong

because computers are not yet in their final form well slides again please so

one of the ways of thinking about this is that there are actually three

revolutions in the way we think about computers one of them is going from

batch processing to time sharing which

happened in the late 60s the one that we're involved in right now is this

Gutenberg type revolution where we have the machine on our own desk it's a

personal computer but the one that's going to endure is the one that some of

us call intimate computing where the computer goes with you right now let's

test this out how many people have a full-fledged computer on them right at this moment hold it up

well that's that's okay that's better how many out is that okay that's better

a few years ago you couldn't even get one now five years from now we'll

probably half of this audience will have something and 10 years from now

everybody who now has a piece of paper and a pencil will have something that is

continuously communicating we're the global information utility that is just

like a power and lighting utility it's something that is supplying us with access to information the complete set

of issues change now of course we're going to all as our media but a big

thing that's going to happen is the way we deal with the computer our relationship with the computer is going

to change once more and so if we spend too much time tooling up on what is now

an obsolete version of technology the

desktop computer and don't look ahead enough we're going to miss the most

important revolution which is I call the eldest revolution the revolution where

we do mundane things on the computer as well as important things and it's the

mundane things that turn into the creative ideas the thing you do on the back of the envelope now are the things

that are really important should somebody was asking right before I came

on well how the parents going to turn on

the computer do you turn on your watch

see we can't think about it the same way these computers of the future will not

have an on/off switch they'll be doing things too important for you to ever

turn them off okay so

here's a little another way of thinking about it is use the same kind of

materials and change the architecture amazing things happen the Greeks were

smart but they could had a really hard time letting the light in the temples

because they used so much material just holding the roof up and it is amazing

fact that some of the larger Gothic

cathedrals of Europe have about the same amount of material in them as much

smaller Greek temples but that material is in a beautiful spider work lacework

of balancing stresses to the ground that lets these enormous windows the light in

from the from the outside and a couple hundred years ago we went to a completely dorant set of leverages which

is pulling on things instead of pushing that allows us to build the geodesic

dome if we wished overall the Gothic cathedrals ever made each of these

architectures is the dominant dominant thing architecture dominates material in

every important instance now let me show

you some examples of how I think we have

to at least start dealing with this a few years ago I visited oh I'm sorry I

wanted right got to have to communicate when I want the slides on and off a few

years ago 85 I walked into a marvelous public school in Los Angeles called the

open magnet school and I was there for

about two minutes and I thought boy we could do some really neat stuff here and

the principal Bobby Blatt was absolutely

unafraid of anything I suggested in fact she managed to scare me before our first

meeting was out by convincing me to try

and do a project using the entire school not just the fifth grade like I wanted

to and so for the last five years we've been dealing with an entire school which

is now numbers about 375 children in 12

classrooms deployed as six double classrooms and I think the most

important point I always want to make when I talk about the school is that we didn't go in and make the school

great this school was already great in

fact we used to mumble to ourselves that line from the Hippocratic oath which

says above all do no harm this was a

school that had a strong involvement with parents it had a value system it

had a way of dealing with the

acquisitive and the inquisitive nature

of the of the children was set up in fact a lot like a graduate research

program where the kids were the researchers and the teachers were the facilitators was a facilitation model of

knowledge rather than this drop eyedropper knowledge and in fact this is

a garden that they have that was built by tearing up the asphalt of part of the

school yard in which they do a curriculum which is called life lab

which is in 40 or 50 schools here and the children actually designed this

garden built it and take care of it and start most of their basic science

courses from growing real things right in the middle of West Hollywood so what

we had in mind was this notion of Cesare aveces and pjs and Brunner's and

monasteries pouvais say said to know the world one must construct it so we got

interested in having the kids construct things and learn things by constructing

and not just things that have to do with computers but just learning about the

universe that they're in by making things and having to do design and this

ramified over the years into a rather rich set of curriculum I'm just going to

take you on a little tour through so we start the that second tape please

and it's it's a rather modest set up the

maggot schools are often in bungalows temporary structures perched on the

playgrounds of of other more kosher type

schools demographics are in the rough ratio of Los Angeles as a whole because

that's how they choose the kids for the school here the kids designing the

garden and because we study animals as well we have a beautiful pond that they built now here they're doing something

that I'm not going to tell you what they're doing for a minute see if you

can figure it out I can tell you this is a design exercise we're actually

designing a city and balloons you're a wonderful thing to design a city with

because ignore that guy yeah thanks so I

urban renewal is easy with balloons so

what I like to do is to show you effect we stop the tape for just a second

thanks what I'd like to do is to show

you three large-scale programs that are

done in the school all of them are done

through the teachers we found that to be one of the most amazing differences from

the projects that we've done before is because we're dealing with the entire school every piece of curriculum that we

do is actually taught by the teachers we don't we are in the classroom as

observers sometimes we help but the teachers are the ones that that lead the

way and none of the teachers in the school were picked for being experts in

computers most of them had never used the computer before and the features in

the school actually are picked a lot by how much they really like kids and boy

does that make a difference the self-esteem of the kids and what the

belief and the kids of themselves as movers and shakers is something that the

school preserves very well through the through the first through sixth grade so

first what I'm going to do is show you a project in which we've only done a

limited amount of computer stuff and it's a it's a

six-month curriculum in city design for

third and fourth graders these children go for a large portion of their school

year thinking about designing a very large scale city the idea was originally

thought up by doreen Nelson and is

implemented in the third and fourth

grade so these kids are seven eight and nine years old so let's roll the tape I

know but still everything's part of it I

know but they're already something you

should make something Abbess is always something this or something this is already something everything you left

everything this is only something I know

everything's me as something that is made from a balloon doesn't mean we

don't have to design knowledge now to make buildings exactly like they would

have to make it a hundred years we're making models ideas for what buildings

could be like in a hundred years we don't have the materials we're going to

happen hundred here's our red starts right

ok

wait to dig in and shake your head here

and do the character park you little bit y'all be the building I'm the person and

he's the building these the buildings okay

welcome to fantasy ma we have what the

stuff the building collapse t he was

trying to see the moon and they have been collapsed my apartment building and

on the top as a swimming pool nibsy it's

a cold day in rainier so you could have an endorsement for if it's hot you open

it up you hope your ideas down here

tomorrow will be our future city is opening as you can see our transfer case

our monorails just been strong

and all the buildings are beginning to look like buildings all the buildings

are being checked and painted and now

our we cannot pick up the side country useful because of the monorail and

transportation we have these things on our site everybody that wants to have

air transportation land on your site must have Nikki Fox is that Commissioner

tova cats design this whole monorail spirit soul monorail and monorail

station Shiva Commissioner of land she's awesome

good shot she's all for helping us sidewalk these are my sidewalk my phone

earthquake definitely damn girl Robin teleporting man he puts

ebook paper towel rolls on our site static patella to have it be a

teleporting station their cities is getting to look like a real City try

getting to like Judy Landers on the moderator fun of it into Los Angeles

president the hell crowd is starting to blush crowded than it was when we were

making our study models

one inch tall would look wicked building hey stop the tape for a second so this

is a wonderful curriculum it gets better year by year the kids are just have been

working doing various kinds of mock-ups and object design and stuff for the last

several months and they're just getting ready for their big push of designing the final City which will take the next

three months so we occasionally have

visitors down there if you want to drop by in a couple of months and see something nifty this is one of the

things that's going on now I think you can see why we don't use computers a lot

in this particular curriculum this is whole body stuff and having the kids

being able to crawl around and interact the way they do they are in different

quality control groups they chose those

quality control groups because they do an instant city in the beginning of the thing it turns out to be a nightmare and

they realize that they have to have groups that are responsible for things

like parks and schools and garbage removal and a whole bunch of things that

they never thought of when they started so it's a very wonderful process we do

use the computer for simulating some communication city systems spread of

pollution and a small number of things like that but this is an example of

something that if we were to transfer it to a computer right now we would kill

about ninety percent of what's good about it so it's a perfect example of

you know leave it alone it's great yeah

we'll be able to have more and more computer involvement as the next decade goes by but we're still not going to

ever take the bodies away from the kids that would be the cruel thing as long as

they've got bodies they have to use them and interact and learn with them now

another thing that we helped in the school was a an aura T flourishing music

program which is being done in spite of prop 13 taking away the music and arts

stuff and since a lot of us were musicians and

think that music is what makes life worth living we wanted to help with that

and again we had some experience with computers and music though some of which

was positive and some of which wasn't positive but we decided to do something else instead of aiming directly at the

computer what we decided to do is to see if we could turn every kid into the school into a musician by getting them

to sing more and more interesting kinds of things and each year the principal

Bobby Blatt sets up and does a full

evening musical with the three older grades this last year they did pirates

of penzance the pool of kids that were available for this we're 150 kids 120

children worked like dogs for four months stayed the entire course for this

musical they refused to do the stripped-down version of it they went

out and got the Linda Ronstadt movie and they wanted to do everything he wanted

to sing in harmony in it they wanted to do every single thing in it and they did

and because the rehearsals were shaping up so beautifully the parents organized

a multiple camera shoot of the final result i'm going to show you about five

minutes of this and give you an example i think of what kids can do when they

really want to so

Oh

fishing what I don't want it by memoir

and revelry I can talk site I'm not a

run home from a javelin one cent affairs

as sorties enterprises I'm aware heeya

and whenever precisely what is meant by

commissary husband made it modern gonna

be another me and short one of a

smattering of elemental stretch

Oh

I'm telling a damn sorry but it doesn't

diminish

me

although our dock career sometimes

involves when I was nearly queen

rattling never

all right we're always sorry to me for

life without a touch of poetry

Oh

you

Oh

you may go fear at liberty or private

rules protect you and Kyra members over Vance we do let you okay skip to the

next gap please so you get the idea now

we're doing this largely because it's fun and things that are fun or

intrinsically worthwhile doing but also each of the things that we've set up

there have the kids getting interested

in what you might call the ecology of interaction between things that have many complex interacting parts whether

it's a city worked on by 60 children with hundreds of buildings whether it's

a musical worked on by 120 children all

sorts of timing and coordination these things are actually a lot more like the

real problems of life than most of the problems that the children get to work on and what's even better is that they

are fun in a way that the children can commit deeply to quality we measure you

might ask how do we measure our progress in this project we measure it by the

quality of the things that the kids do how deep they're willing to go how much

they're willing to work on their own without being pushed the depth of their

knowledge is what we're interested in because this school is about the liberal

arts and the liberal arts is about interacting with our humaneness in a

depth way in a depth way so now let me

finish by just showing you a couple of examples of some of the computer stuff

we do and here we're going to go to a four or five classroom the kids are 9

and 10 years old and what we'll see is

some work that they've been doing on simulating animal Ecology's not just

simulating the animals but simulating the environments which the animals have

to work in so let's run

you see this looks a little different from the IBM classroom because as the

camera pans around you won't see any computers the computers are actually all

in these special desks we built so they don't get in the way they're always on

nobody has to switch them on the kids don't have to use them for anything the

teachers don't have to use them but they can if they want and they use them quite

a bit now here's some early work the

children did of just these are just animations done in hypercard so these

are like Disney Animation's there's no artificial intelligence behind any of

these creatures but the next phase of

the project

you're asking for every player asian food the whale come up the way I also

have some ancient all right let me tell you why because when the agent looks in

his world it doesn't look at himself it

looks at the world beyond him so that's

why it only looks at those players who have food but it doesn't count himself

but if he asked for every player in the

universe and include himself and this is

kind of important for you to think about because when he when they have to start

giving birth to eat to themselves so they won't die off they have to be able

to count everything in the universe y DP

how many there are like it if there was

only one left it was himself the Pacific

coast it is the time of year when the whales migrate down to Mexico to me and

to give birth to their babies who were can see the year before so children have

to build everything here

that works don't you want and I move

away

so here's here's kind of an example of a project they do this is a in ecology

that has a clown fish and some seein enemies and food and predators in it

this is done in a new kind of programming language we invented for this project called playground and what

the clown fish does besides getting food is it eventually picks in an enemy that

for that it likes and it spends a little time getting closer and closer to the

poison absorbing a little of the poison it gradually acclimates to the Stingers

of the enemy you see it's just now

foraging for food and it hasn't seen the

shark yet the shark hasn't seen it yet so eventually it will go back to the

enemy and acclimate some more at some

point the shark will smell the clownfish

and start moving towards it this is not

an animation because you could put the shark in different places and you can

put the clownfish in different places and each one of them each of the end of

these entities there is independently control they have little artificially

intelligent minds okay and now the sharp

sees it and the enemy and the clownfish sees that the shark is coming so it

makes a run for the anatomy and gets there just in time and the shark is

repelled by the anatomy and in fact we'll go back and forth quite a bit

until something else comes out to distract the shark away some new food

source so stop the tape right there please so that's an example that's sort

of the version that's like the city building project there are lots of

different animals they have lots of different behavior patterns and it's another design project that gets the

kids to learn about things by actually making them now they have to read lots

of books but they read the books because they want to read the books because they

want to find about out about the things that they're constructing so we don't tell them to

read the books but we have the books around so that if they want to learn

more about something and they always do then they'll go and read the books themselves if you think about this is

sort of the way we like to function in adult life we like to have our own

interests we like to go on our own volition follow up the things that were

interested in and a well-designed curriculum environment will have things

set up so that the things that the state of California and the parents want the kids to learn will automatically be

learned in the midst of this much more exciting stuff that is much more like

real life and the kids know the difference one of the biggest thing is

something that do we pointed out in 1895 was that most of our kids are

disenfranchised for most adult pursuits a little kid with dressed in a nurse's

uniform and holding a doll can't do the real content only the form of what the

adult nurse does whereas the kid in Africa learning about bows and arrows

and shooting rabbits is actually learning through play what the adults do

and that's been the way of humanity for

the last several hundred thousand years we learn in play what we do as adults except now we can except now we can

because we can now structure the kinds of play that the kids want to do so that

they are actually doing things that have content and projections into the adult

world so this stuff is really strange

new interesting maybe a little scary but

as always the best weapon we have to deal with things like this is the one

between our ears providing it's loaded thank

ok