By Lars Kongshem
 APRIL 2001 -- If
anyone has a right to be cranky about the current state
of computing in education, it's Alan Kay. Call it the visionary's
curse: Great philosophical ideas tend to succumb to entropy
once the marketplace begins exploiting the ideas for financial
gain.
More than 30 years ago, Alan Kay invented the concept of the
personal computer and coined the term to describe it. He pointed
the way in user interface design by devising overlapping windows,
and he revolutionized software architecture by developing the
first object-oriented programming language, known as Smalltalk.
A founder of the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC),
Kay also had a hand in the development of Ethernet, laser printers,
client-server computing, and the Arpanet -- the beta version of
the Internet. In fact, it's hard to imagine any aspect
of modern computing that doesn't owe a lot to Alan Kay's work
during the 1960s and 70s.
Too bad there hasn't been much progress since then. Steve
Jobs borrowed Kay's ideas for the Macintosh. Then Bill Gates borrowed
the same concept from Apple and called it Windows. Each iteration
came to market as an increasingly dim facsimile of the original
vision. The legacy: plenty of reboots, but no revolution.
"We're pissed off about what's been happening in computing
-- there's been no vision," a grouchy Alan Kay told Electronic
School last month. "The people who did computing in the 1960s
did it for fun, not profit. All the stuff was done by Ph.D's.
The current generation of programmers are nailpounders
-- they don't know anything about architecture. The good thing
is that computers still allow anybody to program them, although
Microsoft would prevent that if they could."
We caught up with Alan Kay at the Association for Computing Machinery's
ACM1 conference in San Jose, where he was giving a keynote speech
titled "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet." Perhaps
it should have been called "The Computer Revolution Still
Hasn't Happened Yet," since Kay's talk at the Educom '98 conference
had the exact same title -- underscoring that the revolution
does, in fact, take time.
"What has gone on since 1980 could hardly have been more mundane,"
Kay told the audience of researchers and educators. "It's been
a caricature of the ideas we had in the 1960s."
As for the culprit, look no further than the mass market's failure
to quickly grasp the full potential of computing. In his presentations,
Kay likes to point out that it took several hundred years
after the invention of the printing press before that technology
catalyzed the real printing revolution in society. This is a familiar
theme to those who study the adoption of new media: Consider the
first motion pictures, which used a stationary camera to film
traditional plays on a stage. It took a while before anyone hit
upon the idea of panning and moving the camera around to create
what we now think of as movies.
And so it is with computers, which still are used mostly to automate
paper-based processes -- in businesses as well as schools. Kay
scoffs at the current educational application of computers, which
he describes as "expensive typewriters" that simply substitute
one display medium for another.
So what's the answer? According to Kay, the point of having
computers in schools should be to have children investigate
and learn about deep ideas in ways that can not be accomplished
in another medium. Already in the early 1970s, Kay was working
with children at Xerox PARC to understand how a computer can serve
as an amplifier of learning. His vision of the Dynabook
-- a portable computer light enough for children to carry around
-- was much too advanced for the available hardware at
the time, but even now that the technology has caught up, his
vision remains unfulfilled.
But Kay is nothing if not tenacious. Now 60 years old,
he has been working for several years on a project called Squeak
that aims to bring his vision of the computer as a learning amplifier
into the 21st century. (Disney is currently funding Kay's research,
thus the mouse-oriented nomenclature.)
"Squeak is a pure notion of what computing should be: Authoring
for all," Kay told Electronic School. Kay calls Squeak
a "wide-spectrum authoring environment," because it gives children
as young as five years the ability to construct meaningful
projects at a basic level -- while giving adult programmers
limitless potential to code.
Demonstrating Squeak's object-oriented simplicity at the
most basic level, Kay showed the ACM1 audience how a child can
draw a car and a steering wheel on the screen, and then connect
the two objects symbolically so that the steering wheel controls
the heading of the car. "We don't give kids clip art, because
it's really important for them to learn how to draw," he added.
To make the car easier to steer, Kay showed how to plug in a
reduction gear between the steering wheel and car: "This example
shows the kid why division is useful," Kay said. "It's probably
the first time a fifth-grader has had use for division."
In another version of the car scenario, Kay showed how a student
had painted a winding road on the screen and programmed the car
to follow it by instructing the car to change its heading when
it encountered the edge of the road. "This kid has discovered
feedback, which is a very powerful idea," Kay pointed out.
To demonstrate Squeak's relevance to more complex concepts, Kay
showed how simple simulations can give students immediate hands-on
insight into the spread of epidemics. Using another simulation,
he provided a powerful visual demonstration of how mankind's built-in
focus on short-term survival predisposes us to ignore slow-moving
but inevitable disasters.
As an "idea processor," Squeak builds on Kay's decades-earlier
work on Smalltalk and allows kids to program, visualize, and play
with powerful ideas in science, math, art, and music. Projects
and simulations of complex ideas can be authored and shared across
the Internet. Interestingly, Squeak is its own operating system,
and it is also written completely in itself. This means that sufficiently
advanced students can rewrite Squeak entirely if they so
desire, Kay said. "In fact I wish they would," he added. As open-source
software, Squeak has been updated 4,000 times already, Kay noted.
Squeak also runs on all computing platforms.
"This is the way we used to do things at PARC," Kay told Electronic
School. Who says we can't learn from the past? As Alan Kay
himself is fond of saying, "The most important ideas are the hardest
to learn." It's time we started -- otherwise we'll be waiting
forever for that computer revolution.
Lars Kongshem, former senior technology editor of Electronic School, is a freelance writer living in San Francisco. Photo by the author.
Socket archive: September
1999, June 1999, February
1999, November 1998
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