Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas

> all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original one I designed for Etoys more than 20 years ago now -- most of the followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk. I was curious about this TED talk, and found the part where he demonstrates Etoys in the section called "Personal Computing & Children Today". Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas ▶ this video The way he interacts with a running program, moving statements around and editing them, observing the values of variables as they change.. It's really an ancestor of Snap, and I can see its influence on Bret Victor's talks like Inventing on Principle. --- Mike Travers' thesis, "Agar: An Animal Construction Kit" is an entertaining and thought-provoking read. > An animal construction kit is an interactive computer system that allows novice programmers to assemble artificial animals from simple components. These components include sensors, muscles or other effectors, and computational elements. They can also include body parts such as limbs, bones, and joints. A complete animal construction kit must also provide a world for the animal to live in, and must support the co-existence of multiple animals of different species. It reminds me of the book, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. It's about modelling a world of autonomous agents with sensors and actuators, motivations and behaviors. link (EDIT: This book is listed in the bibliography of

Maybe these are mostly too new, or you have different (more practical, hands on?) definition of tech-talk - but from a quick look the only speakers I expected - and found - were Sandi Mets and Rob Pike. If it's practical, I'm surprised not to see the js "wat" lightning talk (which I now can't seem to find...). If it's more general "best of", I'd expect something like Guy Steele "growing a language" : link Douglas Engelbart "the mother of all demos": link Alan Kay "doing with images makes symbols": link Or, if that's too long, the much more condensed ted talk: "a powerful idea about teaching ideas": ▶ this video (Maybe that's not a "tech talk"?) Rich Hickey "simple made easy" : link To name a few of the top of my head.

It's not the "toy" part that's signifiant. It's the "tinker" part. Think of a 50's automobile with a carburetor and a distributor. You can take apart and tinker with those. In a 2009 car, the distributor and associated parts are a throwaway lump of plastic with metal tabs coming out. "Explorable" is perhaps an even better term. Squeak had the same aims. Skip to 8:20. You'll see kids using the software to explore robotics and do physics of gravitation. ▶ this video