The Ideal Programming
Environment for Children -- Some Big Questions
On February 15, 2005, together with
Carol Strohecker,
I had dinner with Seymour Papert. We
discussed ideas relating to the ideal programming language for children. While
many very interesting topics came up, a few questions were raised that I want to
comment on here:
-
Should the design be driven
primarily by the aesthetics of computer scientists or mathematicians?
-
Clearly much is gained by making
computational abstractions concrete as ToonTalk does, but what is lost?
-
What are
the ultimate goals?
-
Is the
answer a single language or multiple languages?
About six months later I added the
following topics:
-
Where should program
construction take place?
-
Where does turtle geometry fit into the picture? An instance of the choice
between message passing and user interfaces?
-
What
about concurrent and distributed computation?
-
What
should the ideal programming language (or languages) be like?
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