rudolf@satchmo.oce.orst.edu (Jim Rudolf) (02/03/90)
Last night I saw an old (4 years or so?) video of an Alan Kay talk.
It was after he had left Atari and was currently at Apple. His topic
was something along the lines of communication via interfaces. A
number of things he said stood out in my mind.
1. He talked about his work at PARC and how they used children to test
out their interfaces. They discovered that the developing mind goes
through 3 stages when problem solving: doing, seeing, and rational-
izing. Kay gave an example of asking a kid in each stage (4, 8, and
12 years, I think) to draw a circle using turtle graphics. The 4 yr.
old had the most elegant solution, and he explained that he imagined
he walked in a circle by repeatedly walking ahead a little and turning
a little ("doing"). The middle kid had a reasonable solution by re-
membering that every point on the circle is an equal distance from a
point. He would repeatedly start at the center and move a constant
distance in various directions until all the individual points approx-
imated a circle ("visual"). The oldest kid never solved the problem.
All he could think of was x^2 + y^2 = r^2 ("symbolic"). Kay lamented
that most education is aimed at symbolic solutions, when visual
or "do it" solutions are often more natural for people.
2. As an example, he showed an old "60 Minutes" tape of a tennis instruc-
tor that could teach a beginner how to play in 20 minutes. The pro
spent no time telling the student how to stand, or how to hold the
racket. He just told her (the student) to picture herself hitting the
ball and even had her say "bounce" and "hit" when the ball bounced and
when she hit it, to help her concentrate and get into a rhythm. His
point was that our bodies can do amazing things if we just do them and
don't stop to think about how we're supposed to do it. This was also
an excellent way to keep the student focused on the ball and not wor-
ried about stance or grip.
3. From #2, Kay said that when learning something new, small successes
along the way will keep the person focused and interested. He could
understand why people weren't too keen on computer systems where they
had to read 40 pages before they could copy a file.
4. Finally, he showed a video of a co-worker's 22-month old daughter who
could turn on a Mac and use a paint program. The tot had no problem
using the mouse, and in fact never had to look at it. She could easily
associate the cursor movement with the mouse movement. This agreed
with #1, in that the "do it" or kinesthetic (?) sense was the first
to develop in a growing child.
Whew! With that said and done, I was intrigued by this entire video, and
I'd like to find out more. Can anyone point me in the direction of some
literature in this area?
Thanks in advance,
Jim Rudolf
rudolf@oce.orst.edu (Addresses in header are bogus)
Oregon State University