[sugar] Stirring the pot (was re: Education?)

[Antoine van Gelder]

Awesome.

Whole bunch of folk are starting to come out of the woodwork who have 
been thinking for some time about fundamental abstractions.

I read the most excellent Dr Kay's stupendous essay @ 
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/human_condition.pdf this morning and thought 
that the philosophical discussion could perhaps be dragged on a little 
in an attempt to raise the bar of what we believe to be possible so I'm 
going to hijack a metaphor, pour a glass of red wine and riff a little 
on some of the themes he brings up.


Two things when we put kids first: [1]

1) Transmitting the maps of reality we have created.

2) Transmitting the art of map making.


With the objective of 1) we can fudge it as much as we like and 
BigBoxes'o'OpaqueSpaghetti(tm) are not really that big a obstacle.

With the additional objective of 2) we must strive to not only deliver 
tools that are able to build maps up from the most fundamental elements 
in order that kids are free to construct and deconstruct at leisure but 
these tools must also be capable of building new map making tools.


In the endless quest for clarity, allow me to restate the above in 
slightly different words:

a. Kids have, at most, two decades between the start of their 
educational journey and deciding on their life's work. They absolutely 
cannot afford to go down every blind alley explored over the last 2.5K 
years. This requires a tool that makes it easy to create maps that cover 
broad swathes of the curriculum.

b. If kids don't understand our maps on a fundamental level those maps 
are going to be navigating them instead of them navigating the maps. 
This requires a tool that can render maps of reality at any level of detail.

c. A very small, but _immensely_ important, percentage of kids are going 
to be drawing their own maps... This requires a mapping tool that can be 
used to extend  its own abilities as well as create entirely new mapping 
tools.

Okay, we're on to three things.


Now, just because I had a really intensely bad encounter with a 
stupendously rude 
CorporateBeemerDrivingWannabeSoftwareDevelopmentManager today and the 
Gentoo developers are flaming each other again I want to first 
pro-actively bomb the CollectivelyBarelyConscious and make a bit of 
SacredBeefBurger by pointing out that the device I'm describing is 
called a Turing Machine and it has already been discovered by a man who 
chose to end his life rather than continuing to put up with bearing the 
brunt of hysterical&religious superstition from a society whose 
collective ass he helped saved in WWII so please - this is not about 
TribalIdeology or DiscovererBrowniePoints or ImplementationPlatforms but 
rather an attempt to encourage the adding of some more veggies to the 
collective pot.

*phew*

Sorry - had to get that off my chest. My laptop's hostname is Turing. 
It's a Touring Machine. *kachink* [2]


Back to the pot.

I don't think the state of the art (hardware&software) is yet at the 
point where XO can deliver the Dynabook (OK, someone had to say it) and 
it probably won't even be SqueakAsPlatform BUT it _does_ deliver:

1) A Turing Machine implemented on top of a Von Neumann architecture 
with a rather frighteningly large amount of RAM compared to my beloved 
Commodore 64.

2) A complete course in classical operating system design in the form of 
its source code.

3) A powerful platform for building interactive simulations courtesy of 
X, Cairo and Python that I would have given a body part for when I was a 
kid.

4) An innovative and easy to learn primary user interface in the form of 
Sugar.

5) A complete development environment in the form of Develop, GCC, 
JavaScript, Python etc.

6) A window on an entire universe of education in the form of Evince, 
Mozilla, PenguinTV, Chat etc.

7) Mapping tools on a par with anything which is not still in research 
phase in the form of Abiword, eToys, Wiki, TamTam etc.

Wow. Just wow. Thank you. Everyone.


But this brings me to a metric because Dr Kay mentioned the Science word 
and if you can't measure it, it ain't Science; it's Economics.

So what's the difference between the XO and its successors ?

I posit that the difference is learning complexity.

A bright kid orientated towards computers and starting from scratch 
would probably take around five years[3] to truly master the XO 
environment from top to bottom and be able to do RealWork[4] on it. This 
is 25% of the time alotted to hem before they must decide on their 
life's work.

So my questions, in order of temporal importance, are:

1) What problems solved and what features added NOW would _increase_ the 
payback of that time investment ?

2) What can be done NOW to _decrease_ the duration of that time investment ?

3) Once the entire system fits into 20 000 lines of code... what is the 
next important metric ?


Thank you for the space for a rant.

Be excellent to one another.

  - antoine


[1] Good grief please don't tell me any sincere person has doubts about 
this project. - given a choice between a $150 XO or a ~$1000 AK-47... 
(http://www.impactguns.com/store/arsenal.html - actually I'm cheating on 
the numbers - you can pick up a used one for around $100 in my neck of 
the woods, cheaper the further north you go)

[2] With apologies to Andrew Roos.

[3] Feel free to slam that figure. It's a thumbsuck. Someone with more 
free time and resources than I can go study it and get the real number!

[4] RealScience, RealArt, RealSports, RealCoding. Being able to jam with 
a peer in any country in the world.