About My Playgrounds Talk

On February 23 I spoke at the Playgrounds conference for iOS developers in Melbourne, Australia. I spoke about the purpose of education, what programmers can do about it, and how the current “learn to code” movement falls totally short of accomplishing important educational goals.

I intend to provide a more formal, essay version of what I covered in the talk in the coming weeks (famous last words), and I’ll definitely link to the video recording of the talk once it’s published, but in the meantime I wanted to provide a few links to things I talked about as fuel for anyone interested in following up.

Alan Kay

As mentioned in my presentation, my talk was largely inspired by the work of Alan Kay. Indeed, part of me wanted to just hop up on stage, hit play on this talk by Alan, and let the whole thing play out. Alas, I also wanted to provide a bit more context for the Swift / Playgrounds audience, so I decided to speak a bit more in terms of what Apple is up to. Suffice it to say, these ideas are neither mine, nor are they new (personal computers have been seen as potential devices of enlightenment roughly as long as they’ve existed). See also Alan’s paper where he envisioned something like the iPad nearly 50 years ago.

Where do we go from here?

Let’s say you were in the audience of my talk, and you more or less liked what you heard, and you want to participate. What now? It’s a tricky question to answer, but I’ll do my best. (Honestly I was quite unprepared for the largely positive feedback to the talk; I probably should have prepared this sort of answer in advance!)

As mentioned in the talk, the first thing you should do to help is learn. Read books about learning and education (and understand the difference!). Talk to teachers and learners and try to understand what their needs are.

“Learning” is of course an on-going process; not one you start and finish before doing something else (in fact, you’ll often learn a lot by studying plus doing at the same time). Try to make informed inventions. Do you think everyone needs tools to create and reason about complex systems? Try to make such an environment! (Hat tip to the three men from New Zealand, whose names escape me, who chatted with me about Sim City — I could write a whole post about that game, what’s good and what’s bad from a systems learning perspective. For now, google “Alan Kay Sim City” and you should get an interesting discussion about it).

Developing new systems for education is of course quite difficult, so I’d recommend starting small, and prototyping as much as you can. Apple has a great talk about prototyping, as does my former coworker, May-Li Khoe. Prototyping allows you to iterate quickly, and think out loud.

And while you’re learning and building, reach out! There’s a small community of people who research and develop this sort of thing, and the more people working on this, the better. These are hard problems, so the more people working together and collaborating, the more likely any of us will make a positive impact.

Coming Soon

As mentioned earlier, I plan on eventually releasing a more formal, essay version of my talk, with full references to everything I spoke about, hopefully in a less-nervous presentation (getting up in front of 200 people is hard too). I will link to it here when it’s ready.

I’ll also link to the video of the talk when it’s available, too.

Thank you so much to everyone who had encouraging discussions with me about the talk. It truly made all the work worth it.