Alan Kay's Talk at TED 2

Posted by Nicholas Chen Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:14:00 GMT

There are certain events that are just so exciting that I feel compelled to blog about them immediately after I experience it. This is one such event.

Alan Kay recently gave at talk at TED. You can view his video from here. Like all TED talks, it's about 20 minutes long so it's short and straight to the point. The rest of my post will make references to the video, so reading it without watching the video might not make much sense.

Unsurprisingly, in the video, Kay demonstrated the canonical moving car example for Etoys. The moving car demo is something that most people familiar with Squeak would have seen. It's really simple but it lets kids experience programming in a fun interactive way. Unfortunately, this is something that most modern languages have failed to enable. After all, which is more fun: printing text to the screen or watching your creation actually move on screen?

However, the second part of Kay's demo was even more interesting. He shows what you can do to help illustrate some simple math and physics properties in an insightful manner. It uses all the features of Etoys (or maybe the full Squeak implementation) to let students experiment by themselves.

Virtual Tape Meter
Experimenting with this would have been so much cleaner than using a tape meter. It's actually even cooler when you watch the animation or code it up yourself in Etoys.

For instance (and this was something that impressed me), you could design a simple car that drop dots along as it moved. So, a car that is accelerating will be dropping dots further and further apart from one another. This is basically the same idea as using a tape meter. However, the animation of the car moving and dropping dots seem so much cleaner to me. You can easily illustrate the concept of velocity and acceleration without having to talk about friction, etc. Something that is unavoidable with a real experiment. This helps especially when you are teaching a younger audience about the basic principles of motion.

Toward the end of the talk Kay showed an example running on the OLPC. So I was curious whether all courseware on the OLPC will be interactive or whether they will be like normal textbooks only in digital format. Either way, it's already hard enough to actually get good content onto the OLPC. As far as I know, there is no group dedicated to creating content for the OLPC yet.

However, I was able to find a couple of interactive learning environments at OLPC Courseware Review but, from the list, it seems that Dr. Geo II is the only one that has been ported to run on the OLPC. It would be interesting to see if there is a Google Summer of Code project for creating/porting an existing interactive learning environment to the OLPC.

Incidentally I was reading "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart which also talks about how to revamp the current K-12 mathematics education. The paper is available from here. Basically, Lockhart says that there is not enough experimentation with math going on in the class rooms. And that most of math is rote memorization with little appreciation for the beauty of math.

The math education back in Malaysia is not much better either. In school, the teachers are more interested in finishing the syllabus. So students either get-it in school or have to rely on paid tutors to teach it to them. There's very little appreciation on the derivation of the proofs of math. Either the derivation is skipped entirely while teaching or it follows the route of the boring derivation on the board that doesn't engage students.

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    Dom 10 days later:
    As I see it, Paul Lockhart’s essay would be much more powerful if it were not written in such a complete historical vacuum. Although Lockhart decries the sterile formalism in which mathematics courses have been and continue to be taught, he makes absolutely no reference to the fact that the traditional mathematics curriculum was demolished by the excessive formalism and abstractions of the SMSG new math, as incorporated in the Houghton Mifflin series of books co-authored by Mary P. Dolciani. This apparent ignorance on Lockhart's part is likely due to the fact that he was educated with Dolciani-type books, and he may not be aware of the preceding textbooks. The manner in which Lockhart ridicules Thales' Theorem (which he does not name), on page 19 of the PDF file, is utterly unacceptable--and it raises serious questions about the rest of his lament about Euclidean Geometry. When I studied 10th-grade Euclidean Geometry in 1963-64, at Everett High School, in the factory city of Everett, MA, we used the textbook by William G. Shute, William W. Shirk, George F. Porter, "Plane and Solid Geometry," American Book Company (1960). On page 25-27, the textbook contains a historical Note about Thales (640-546 B.C.), Thales' demonstration that all vertical angles are equal (considered to be the first theorem ever proved), deductive reasoning, and the components of a proof of a theorem. According to the Note, when Thales visited Egypt, he observed that whenever the Egyptians drew two intersecting lines, they would measure the vertical angles to make sure that they were equal. Thales concluded that one could prove that all vertical angles are equal if one accepted some general notions such as: 1. all straight angles are equal 2. equals added to equals are equal, etc. At the top of page 10 on the PDF file, Lockhart writes: "So put away your lesson plans and overhead projectors, your full-color textbook abominations, your CD-ROMs and the whole rest of the traveling circus freak show of contemporary education, and simply do mathematics with the students!" Although this advice is quite sound, it is unfortunate that Lockhart conveniently makes absolutely no reference to the fact that all this rubbish has been produced and promoted by the self-styled math reformers of the past two decades.
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    Nicholas Chen 11 days later:
    Although this advice is quite sound, it is unfortunate that Lockhart conveniently makes absolutely no reference to the fact that all this rubbish has been produced and promoted by the self-styled math reformers of the past two decades.

    I agree that there should be some empirical study about the use of these "self-promoted" reforms in education. My appreciation for these new methods (unfortunately) might come about from the fact that I already know the basis of them and I am viewing them from a different perspective. Viewing things from different perspectives usually helps to solidify understanding. But I am not really sure whether it would help someone who has yet to understand the basic concepts.

    And things are usually not as ideal with these new methods as their proponents might claim. Python and Smalltalk:

    I knew more than one person who in years past inspired by an Alan Kay presentation have tried Squeak only to encounter lots of bugs and problems with the core tools or trying to duplicate the demos he shows.

    Just as a reader is inclined to give up on a book that is poorly written, someone who encounters numerous distractions from a system is also likely to just abandon the system. In this case, since the distractions themselves are not even pertinent to the material being studied, they are nothing but noise. On the other hand, the abstractions and formalisms used in the traditional books -- turgid as they might be -- do pertain to the material that is being studied.

    Other interesting points to consider (and I discussed these with my colleagues) are retention and knowledge transfer. Retention: how long does the student retain the main ideas that have been taught. Knowledge transfer: are they able to apply the knowledge they learn to solve other problems? After all, what is the point of just studying something only to pass an exam?

    So new methods aren't necessarily better especially if they only have shallow retention and knowledge transfer.

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