Alan Kay on teaching children to program (1993)

Excerpts I found interesting:

- Tools provide a path, a context, and almost an excuse for developing enlightenment, but no tool ever contained it or can dispense it. [Cesare] Pavese observed: to know the world we must construct it. In other words, we make not just to have, but to know. but the having can happen without most of the knowing taking place.

- They love to do, even when they are not sure exactly what they are doing.

- What is difficult is to determine what ideas to put forth and how deeply they should penetrate at a given child's developmental level.

- Even very young children can understand and use interactive transformational tools. The first ones are their hands!

- They can answer any question whose answer requires the application of just one of these tools. But it is extremely difficult for them to answer any question that requires two or more transformations. Yet they have no problem applying [sequences] of transformations, exploring "forward."

- It seems that what needs to be learned and taught is now to package up transformations in twos and threes in a manner similar to learning a strategic game like checkers.