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