[Phys-L] "Let's teach kids to code" <-- Mitch Resnick <-- TED-talk

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

Hi --

If you have 15 minutes sometime, I recommend:
  Mitch Resnick
  "Let's teach kids to code"
  http://www.ted.com/talks/mitch_resnick_let_s_teach_kids_to_code

Mitch Resnick is director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at 
the Media Laboratory at MIT.  They've been at this for years.
Some of their work has been quite influential.
    http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/

There's also a list of brief papers on that page.

These guys are purveyors of the Scratch programming language,
which was recently mentioned in this forum.  You can play with 
it yourself:
  http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tip_bar=getStarted

It's written in Flash, so it runs in your browser;  you don't
need to download or install anything.  It's free for all.

Keep in mind that Scratch is for the benefit of little kids,
not for big kids, and certainly not for big-name theoretical
physicists to do their research with.  By way of analogy:  You 
don't want a tricycle, but the little kid doesn't want a racing 
bike.  The little kid is much better off with a tricycle.  There 
are limits on what you can reasonably do with it ... but it's 
easy to get started.

I reckon the grade-school teachers won't get interested in this
until they see the kids get interested, so there's a bit of a
chicken-and-egg problem.  OTOH there are ways of getting around
that;  there are literally millions of kids who have written
code with systems like this.