I recently attended PyCon in Dallas, Texas. The first keynote at the conference was Ivan Krstic who spoke about the One Laptop Per Child or OLPC project. They have chosen Python as the platform development language and imagine kids all over the world who get these devices will be able to push a button on the laptop that will bring up the source code for everything from the filesystem to the user interface -- all will be written in Python.
The second keynote speaker was Adele Goldberg who talked about the state of technology in education. Her premise was to figure out how to use technology in education outside of school first. She mentioned a lack of high quality educational software but I didn't get a chance to flag her down to see if she knew about the research at CMU with the cognitive tutor.
So, I may be getting the keynotes mixed up, but one of the underlying themes of these two talks was obviously how technology can be useful in education. Taking the OLPC example, the idea is that students will be able to not only see something but also begin to understand what it takes to make it work. You wouldn't just learn about what a circle is, but how to write out instructions for creating one to achieve a much fuller understanding of how it works.
Just some thoughts to keep in mind when nugget starts to get older. I remember at a young age my father sitting me down to teach me about fractions. The demonstration of a physical pie that I could move and manipulate proved an effective means.
So, by what age do you think I'll have nugget programming a computer?
No comments:
Post a Comment