Re: Programming languages for the very young

From: Brian Harvey (bh_at_cs.berkeley.edu)
Date: 01/16/04 

Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 18:04:24 +0000 (UTC)

"Anton van Straaten" <anton@appsolutions.com> writes:
> There are a surprising number of people in
>their 20s whose only computer knowledge is how to get from the Windows Start
>button to Internet Explorer and the Yahoo home page - to them, some
>combination of Yahoo+IE *is* the computer. That's all very well, one might
>say, they can surf and buy books from Amazon and generally get stuff done,
>but when they find they aren't able to make a credible stab at writing up
>their own resume in a word processor, I think there's a problem.
>
>Things like this do seem to me to qualify as a "literacy" issue, in a pretty
>similar sense to reading and writing literacy.
...
> But you could apply this argument to just
>about anything that's taught in school - when you look at what goes on at
>schools close up, it's amazing anyone ever learns anything. I don't think
>that's an argument for not trying, although I'm all in favor of finding ways
>to try harder and do better.
...
>It seems to me that kids get plenty of instruction on reading and writing,
>and somehow some of them come out being able to do it quite well, whereas
>others don't (and a whole spectrum in between). One question is whether all
>that instruction makes any difference at all. If it does, then I think kids
>should also be taught other things, including computer skills.
...
>The McDonald's example in the paper caught my eye, too. Let's say I'm wrong
>about universal computer literacy being desirable. In that case, why stop
>there? For what reason do we teach everyone math in school, for example?
>Don't *exactly* same arguments apply?
...
>OK, so how do we decide in advance which people to put on the McDonald's
>track, where they learn to read a restricted vocabulary list replete with
>trademarks, and get a one-month intro to counting change?

Thank you for a thoughtful response to my paper.

I certainly agree that the whole school enterprise needs examination. I'm a
firm believer in progressive education -- a wide collection of
not-all-the-same ideas about learning that I'd characterize as centered on
learning by doing and on respecting the learner as a real autonomous person.

I wouldn't have a "McDonald's track," of course, but I agree that required
math instruction is as bad as required computer instruction -- worse, if
anything, because math *is* something I'd characterize as an essential
skill, and the required instruction just makes most people hate it. (I
don't remember where I read this, but some famous progressive math teacher
once suggested that you try the experiment of telling the person next to you
on the airplane that you're a math teacher and see what happens.)

But in my ideal school, I *would* put a lot of effort into offering great
math education, so great that kids would fight to get into it rather than
groan about "why do we have to learn this," whereas I wouldn't put any
effort into "computer literacy" instruction, which I think would pretty
much take care of itself if we used computers as tools in learning all the
other, more central stuff. If anything, this is more true today than when
I wrote the paper; back then, computers were hard to use, but since then,
a ton of effort has gone into intuitive user interfaces.

If you read the other papers on my web site, you'll see that I'm a Logo
enthusiast. So I do want kids to use computers, but I want them to use
them creatively, and in ways that make the computer itself transparent
rather than the focus of attention (except, of course, for those kids who
decide on their own that they love computers and want to know more about
them).

Are there really people younger than 30 (i.e., who grew up after the
microcomputer revolution) who *can* write their resume with a pencil but
*can't* do it on a computer? I doubt it. I think you'll find that the ones
who can't use a word processor can't do much else that involves thinking
either; what they mostly lack is not a narrowly defined computer skill, but a
language skill.

Just for a moment let me focus on a small detail. People who think in terms
of "computer literacy" want kids to use the actual tools used in adult
offices, so they give kids Word as their text editor. But Word is too hard;
it *does* require some attention to the mechanics of word processing per se.
I'd give them Notepad or something similar -- word processing software that's
transparent, so they can think about what they're writing rather than about
how they're writing it. (Except, again, for some kids, to whom I'd give
Emacs and TeX.)

Some years back, I was on the faculty of an inservice program for teachers in
Ohio, which had just decided to certify Computer Science teachers and had
grandfathered in a bunch of former Computer Literacy teachers. The program
taught both CS and math, and teachers attended for a total of 12 full-time
weeks over two summers. That's what I think it takes to teach teachers how to
use computers in ways that really help kids learn. (Not necessarily a
CS-and-math program, but a really hefty chunk of time spent using computers as
learning tools.) Many of the participants came to the program preoccupied
with technical details; for example, they thought it important to work on
whichever of PCs or Macs their school had. Our response was neither to give
in to their concern nor to fight it on its own terms (i.e., by telling them
that to be "computer literate" they had to be familiar with both platforms),
but rather to show them that if they really know how to think about computers,
they'll be ready to learn, on their own, the details of whatever platform
comes down the road next year -- just like, I bet, everyone reading these
newsgroups.

Similarly, about IE+Yahoo, what I want to teach people about the Web is how
to evaluate what they read -- since they let anybody post things on the Web,
even the likes of CNN and Fox, there's a lot of garbage out there. :-)
A critical thinking skill, not a "computer literacy" skill.