Hacker News Reader

Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

I'm split on how I feel about Apple's continuing efforts to make iPad education a thing: https://www.apple.com/education/preview/

I have sweet memories of spending many a rainy day in the computer lab during recess on the candy-colored imacs, creating art on kidpix, putting together a crappy HTML site that would link to a friend's crappy HTML site, and playing nanosaur, bugdom, and the oregon trail.

Computer education is huge, but I'm not sure if iPads are the right/necessary stepping stone into using an actual computer. They seem more like entertainment consumption devices than creation driving devices where things get messy and frustrating and force you to fool around to fix them, learning in the process.

I've never owned one and I don't have any insight into how much good vs. harm (distraction) they do in the classroom. Anyone have any anecdotes or thoughts to share on Apple's continuing push into the classroom w/ the iPad?

View on HN

Incidentally, that's exactly what Russell Kirsch (invented the first programmable computer) told me when I ran into him in a coffee shop in Portland.

He said:

> “I’ve been against Macintosh company lately. They’re trying to get everyone to use iPads and when people use iPads they end up just using technology to consume things instead of making things. With a computer you can make things. You can code, you can make things and create things that have never before existed and do things that have never been done before.”

The full story is here - http://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/

I hope it doesn't seem like I'm trying to link to my own stuff, but you asked for anecdotes :-/

"(invented the first programmable computer)" ? Citation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_A._Kirsch

In 1951 Kirsch joined the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) as part of the team which ran SEAC, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer.[2] SEAC was the U.S.'s first stored-program computer to become operational.

linked from that page:

""" The University of Manchester's Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM)[15] is generally recognized as world's first electronic computer that ran a stored program—an event that occurred on 21 June 1948.[16][17] However the SSEM was not regarded as a full-fledged computer, but more a proof of concept predecessor to the Manchester Mark 1 computer, which was first put to research work in April 1949. On 6 May 1949 the EDSAC in Cambridge ran its first program, making it arguably "the first complete and fully operational regular electronic digital stored-program computer".[18] It is sometimes claimed that the IBM SSEC, operational in January 1948, was the first stored-program computer;[19] this claim is controversial, not least because of the hierarchical memory system of the SSEC, and because some aspects of its operations, like access to relays or tape drives, were determined by plugging.[20] """

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored-program_computer

I'm afraid that puts him at least 10-20 years behind the curve.

Still not someone whose words on the subject should be dismissed lightly, of course.

Also, Kirsch joined the SEAC team in 1951 after SEAC was already operational.

I agree in theory, but in practice a K12 student-facing Windows desktop is no more programmable than an iPad.

You are locked down to a small subset of site-licensed applications your domain administrator has deemed appropriate for the least common denominator in your age group. All forms of customization are disabled with Group Policy. Novell and Citrix application delivery are common, so you don't even have a Start menu but a proprietary launcher. Extremely aggressive Internet filtering bans large swaths of content about networking to prevent students from learning how to bypass the filter.

Our IT department enabled access to the hilariously antiquated QBasic environment only for students currently enrolled in a programming course and revoked it the next semester. You had to sign a special waiver saying you promised to only write code directly in fulfillment of course requirements and not do any independent experimentation or goofing around.

I get it, but K12 students on non-iPads aren't getting Linux, they're definitely not getting root, and they're probably not getting user-mode code execution either. You'd need to change the entire culture around K12 IT to make that happen.

The best way for kids to learn to be hackers is on their hardware, free from school or parental controls.

I think iPads in education are really aimed at replacing textbooks, which in their paper form never gave students any authoring/hacking capability either. In this context, consumption is the correct way to think of what the iPad enables. But instead of thinking of it like a broken computer, folks can think of it like a lighter, more up-to-date, interactive textbook.

In terms of evaluating Apple as a company, one has to look at their whole product line. iPads may be locked down, but Macs are great platforms for kids to tinker. They ship with a ton of programming languages and integrate with all sorts of free open source technologies.

And I agree that personal hardware is the best place to hack. Decades ago, school computers were the only place to hack because school was the only place to actually put hands on a computer. Today computers (even Macs) are much more affordable, especially used.

Also each book can be licensed and charged independently.

No more sharing or copying knowledge for free for those filthy free-loading kids!

On the other hand - free open source books!

That's what the polish government do (or did try to do) - instead of paying licenses, they hired people to build free educational books.

That sound interesting in principle, but I wouldn't trust a book by the current Polish government. That being said, there are already a number of great open teaching materials available, e.g. http://openlogicproject.org/

“The best way for kids to learn to be hackers is on their hardware, free from school or parental controls“

That's why I think the Raspberry Pi et al are so important, they're disposable yet fully capable pieces of hardware that kids can hack on.

I don't think the Pi is as brilliant for education as it pretends to be.

The Linux command line and the permissions system are incredibly unfriendly to adults, never mind kids. Have you tried to set up a web server with PHP on a Pi? It makes no concessions at all to beginners. You might as well be setting up Ubuntu Server LTS - only it doesn't give you any clues about security.

I'd be more interested in something that updated the experience of the old 8-bit micros, which dropped you straight into a simplified programming environment, and gave you a path to bare-metal machine code if you wanted to take it.

Maybe something like a Python IDE, with a way through to Linux for expert users, but with basic extras - a web server, a mail server, a VPS that could connect to other Pi users, a few other options - pre-installed and ready to go?

Bring back the old 8-bit (C=64, Apple][) machines? Seriously. I know all the above comments are valid - site license lockdowns, iPad 'unprogrammibility', etc - but there's something to be said for no permissions, no network, nothing where you can really make Something Bad(tm).

There's something to be said for those old machines. Basic was a good learning intro and assembly is still valid today. I remember Logo too.. I'm just chomping at the bit when my kids are old enough to dust off the C-64 and start diving in.

The pi installer NOOBS has an option that drops you right into a python interpreter on boot.

The other default, raspbian, has a game programming environment on the desktop.

Though hackernews usually just runs stories on the pi being used for 'smart mirrors' and emulation stations.

At the local hackerspace, there was an older man who came along to fiddle around with his Raspberry Pi and learn programming from a book he had bought.

He faced a problem one time where his Python program wouldn't execute, and I unfortunately had to explain to him what shebang lines do, how to use them, the UNIX executable bit, etc.

The Raspberry Pi is indeed not as educational as it is made out to be. It may have been envisioned as a tool for classrooms, but in practice the Pi is just a toy for hackers. It's not like it was ever going to do much for the classroom anyway. Instead of spending $40 to teach a kid to program using Linux on a Pi, you could spend $0 to teach them to program using Linux in a virtual machine.

Those who want to hack/program/tinke will do so on whatever they have access to. Those who don't—won't, Pi or no Pi.

QBASIC? Lucky! We had COMAL, essentially BASIC but with structured programming constructs. Sounds not bad, except the COMAL editor (for DOS) operated like a home computer from the 80s. You had to type in lines in multiples of ten, renumber and relist!

It's a nice thought, but in practice I doubt it matters all that much. I remember when I was a kid, for most of the class computers were meant for one thing and one thing only:

Playing Oregon Trail.

But there are always one or two kids (I was one of them and I bet you were too!) who wanted to play with code or build something. For those interested in computers, we'll find how to get our hands on them!

I made choose your own adventure games using Hypercard on the only Macintosh in the school in like, third or fourth grade. I'm an outlier though, I know. I also played a lot of Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, and Gertrude's Secrets at school.

The idea that you can't make things on iPads is kinda silly. There's all kinds of things you can make on iPads and iPhones. iMovie, painting apps and all that are creative outlets.

Yes, you need a computer to compile code, but I think k-12 is not really the code compiling scene-- maybe 9th-12th graders, sure, but that's not what the teachers are going to teach (high school teachers that can teach programming are very rare.)

It's mostly consumption, but there are some opportunities for creativity.

For example, "Hopscotch" - http://www.gethopscotch.com - looks promising. It's a visual programming language (plug and socket) with graphics primitives that includes tutorial videos/lessons and a social networking aspect for sharing your creations. It looks like they've gotten some engagement, with people creating little games.

You can also do fairly normal programming using cloud hosted services like c9.io

I remember reading this when it was first published like 4 years ago!

From what I understand, the iPad has had substantial impact in how certain students with special needs are taught. It enables communication with some low functioning students who otherwise could not communicate due to impairments.

Remember computers are not just limited to educating students about computers -- they can function as alternatives to pencil and paper in some cases. For example, they can help students compose papers who otherwise would not be able to write (a student might have a disorder that interferes with the ability to translate thoughts/words into handwriting motion, but otherwise the student might be perfectly capable of composing sentences and logical thoughts -- so dictation is groundbreaking.) They can also help teachers explore understanding of concepts in a way that's uncoupled from traditional representations -- for example letting students answer questions by pointing at pictures instead of speaking.

I don't really know the full extent of it, but from special education teachers I know, the iPad seems to have become an essential tool because it makes these alternative interactions so much easier than they were before.

Do you really think we're going to continue into the future using only paper books? Visual aids were immensely helpful for me in school. Computers are the ultimate visual aid, and tablets are just mobile computers, except for the fact that they actually allow you to manipulate the UI directly with your fingers, making the learning curve significantly lower.

My two year old can work an iPad, but has no idea what a mouse or keyboard is. It's crazy when you watch a child that young manipulating technology like they know what they're doing (turn on, swipe open, find YouTube Kids app, watch Thomas the Train, press home button when done to find a new app).

To think that this can't be applied to educating children of any age seems a bit naive.

I've seen several two year olds use a mouse and keyboard (well, the arrow keys anyway) just fine. They're not cats. I do think it's a bit easier for them to use a touch screen but it's by no means rocket science to use a mouse and keyboard.

> My two year old can work an iPad, but has no idea what a mouse or keyboard is.

Because you have given them access to an iPad, but not a (real) computer?

Right. My toddler knows because she sits in my lap when I'm typing. She has her own spare keyboard to bang on now.

This is going to mirror the helicopter parenting conversation, where other opinions are an attack on the way we were raised.

My company does some volunteering with a local elementary school using Hour of Code[1]. I worked with kids from grade 2-5 and they used iPads to complete the web-based "puzzles". The projects teach programming basics by dragging-and-dropping sets of instructions and using loops, etc. When they couldn't solve a puzzle, I talked to them about testing and building their solution incrementally.

The teachers seemed very excited about it and about building on the experience.

[1] https://hourofcode.com/us

I'm so over tablets for kids.

If I give my 10 yo son a 15 year old Dell laptop with OpenBSD and wifi over a USB dongle, and a book (1), he learns python.

Give him a 27" iMac and he learns to find and play meaningless random crappy Flash games, watch Minecraft videos, and occasionally play minecraft or do something else, like looks something up, checks his homework assignments, et

Give him an iPhone or an iPad, he just learns to find and play meaningless random crappy iOS games.

I honestly think letting my daughter buy her own ipad was poor parenting on my part.

(1) https://www.nostarch.com/pythonforkids

Is it not possible to learn python on the iMac?

Of course it is; the GP is pretty biased. they could just as simply give their kid the same book on an iMac. Equally, their kid could play the equally crappy flash games on a Windows PC, and pick up some nice malware along the way because flash is a disaster.

> they could just as simply give their kid the same book on an iMac.

The old laptop, the iMac, and the book are all in the same room.

Part of it is asking whether learning Python on an iMac is close to the path of least resistance.

I credit much of my childhood computer engineering learning to having to hack on an old cruddy laptop, where either I got nothing or had to learn to make do with what I had. If Minecraft were more readily available to me back then, I wouldn't have much of a reason to learn Python or anything else.

Sure, but you have to not do any of the other things you can do on an imac.

That simply isn't true.

> That simply isn't true.

Nu-huh!

C'mon. Is this what HN has come to?

Look, I'm made an observation: put a kid in a room with three objects, 2 computers and 1 book, and in only one combination does he in fact learn python! He knows the terminal is on the iMac. I know he knows, because he knows how to ssh to another server to launch our Minecraft server. I've shown him python is there. But he doesn't use it.

He frankly seems quite proud of his "hacker laptop" that boots to console. He logs in, starts X, and gets a full-screen xterm running tmux. It even has an antenna sticking out. He thinks it's cool.

Fine. Whatever floats his boat.

But, seriously, if you're writing code, you are quite literally not doing any of the other things that you could be doing with that computer. E.g., browsing the internet, writing a document, drawing, etc, etc.

It's like saying "When I'm writing with this pencil, I'm not doing any of the other things I could be doing with this pencil." E.g., throwing it in the air, braking it in half, pulling the eraser out, sharpening it, whittling it down with a knife, splitting the wood to get the whole lead out, etc, etc.

I'm just stating a fact. There's no argument to be made there. If you want an argument, there are other things to argue about.

Fact? No. Confirmation bias, certainly. The 'fact' that you are trying to assert is that kids can't learn to 'code' on an iMac, which is wrong (and also has nothing to do with the article). Before you argue that words being put in your mouth

> Give him a 27" iMac and he learns to find and play meaningless random crappy Flash games, watch Minecraft videos, and occasionally play minecraft or do something else, like looks something up, checks his homework assignments, et

I think that shows a remarkable lack of imagination. As a counter point, my nephew is happily learning Python on an iPad using both CodeAcademy online and the Pythonista app. When he wants to tinker, his dad will hook up the RPi he has.

What I suspect happened here is the crappy laptop and BSD (iMac is also essentially running a BSD) was give as a "here, learn Python" and the iMac wasn't mentioned.

Be careful not to turn them off of computers. One of the reasons I was so interested in technology growing up was because of games. I started playing them, then wondered how to write them. My Nintendo was constantly in pieces around my room, and still worked :)

I begged for a computer and finally got a C64. Typing basic was soooo slow going then...

Great point. Another anecdote. When I was in 4th grade, we had a class that had 4 TRS-80 Color Computers in the back. The teacher told us, "You guys can play all the games you want on them. You just have to write them first.". That kicked off my love of technology and computers. We learned how to code in ColorBasic, and since we only had 4 computers for 20 kids, we did most of our coding on paper. To this day I still feel most comfortable sketching algorithms or system flows out on paper before firing up the IDE.

Just wait until he discovers video game console emulators :)

In Australia in the early 80s, we had MicroBee computers in our primary schools. I spent a good proportion of a whole year of out of normal lessons, and holed up in the computer room, as I was the only one in the class who had figured out how to operate the machine (including the teacher).

The default MicroBee install came with games, but they were all written in basic, with source code included. My proudest earliest computing memory for the age of 10 is editing the game code to "Cricket" to get it to spout profanities when you hit a 4 or a 6. At this stage I didn't even know what the word hacking meant.

Several years later I got my first PC, a 386 with Windows 3.1. I was thoroughly confused that I couldn't find the source code to change anything. Eventually I found Gorillas and Snake in gw-basic, but it wasn't the same.

I'm forever grateful that the creators of the MicroBee chose to provide games in interpreted basic. I am certain that I wouldn't have pursued a career in programming if not for that initial spark of wanting to understand how things work underneath the hood.

> Eventually I found Gorillas and Snake in gw-basic, but it wasn't the same.

Pointing this out because (from this comment) you seem like the kind of person who'd want to be correct: Gorillas and Snake were qbasic (and they were DOS programs, even though you could run them in a window on Win 3.x (from MS-DOS 5.x or 6.x)). gw-basic was the old, numbered-line interpreter that ran on DOS 3.x (or maybe even earlier).

Again, no trying to be "well-actually guy"; just trying to help preserve some nostalgia. (-:

Good catch! Indeed, I was running qbasic in an ms-dos window :)

Funny, that 27" iMac comes with Unix, Python, Ruby, Perl and PHP preinstalled. May also contain Garage Band and iMovie. Good for consumption only.

Don't I know it. The problem is getting him to stay on task. There's just too much to do there. Xterm, tmux, python, and mg (emacs-y editor he prefers) limit how much willpower he has to exert to stay on task. And like I said elsewhere in this thread, all three objects are in the same room. But only once combination leads to him learning. gcr's comment below is very insightful: why learn python if you have minecraft?

Why don't you give her one of the programming, game developing or drawing apps that exist on the store?

There are multiple to choose from, even if they aren't featured as app of the day.

Granted, they are much more limited than a desktop version, but good enough to stir the curiosity of creating something.

I think there's a ton of potential, TBH. Look at Pythonista, for example. My 12yo is having a ton of fun with that. I don't see why such environments couldn't exist for other pedagogically interesting languages such as e.g. Racket.

Racket has a great teaching environment from HTDP. Its part of the default install also.

I know. Would be pretty cool to have the same on the iPad as well, with the kind of polish that Pythonista offers. I'd pay for that.

I'm mixed mainly because I feel like their enthusiasm for what the product can do outstrips what it is often used for, and I don't know that what they're pushing actually matches up with what Education users need.

As other users said, I think they're trying to replace the textbook rather than replacing the computer lab. But alot of what we've seen so far shows that students may actually retain info better from a physical book. Also, netbooks with keyboards are probably better for typing &co. than much of the interface (while being quite a bit cheaper).

So it feels more like a shiny, expensive, early adopter/guinea pig program than this revolution in education. OTOH, there is a huge potential upside once the tech matures, and maybe it can't mature without starting somewhere.

Apple's supposedly working on XCode for the iPad: https://www.macstories.net/linked/why-the-ipad-pro-needs-xco...

You watch star-trek, and other films/shows set in the future that show classrooms with tablet like devices?

There is something pretty special with the tablet, and the only thing that is changing is really the way input (and less so-output) is done.

As a kid, I also remember the power strips for the Apple lab were so janky, that if you accidently kicked it, it would reset the entire bank of computers.

Or those old 5 1/2 floppy disks that had exposed magnetic media that tended to get screwed up.

Logo-writer, kidpix (omg so great), Hypercard, were foundational to me.

But todays children have access to minecraft, and very soon Virtual Reality. There is no way I'd want to force the tools of my education on kids today.

I'm so excited for my (soon to be born) child.

I totally agree that tablets suck for creation. But I think you're assuming that programming is the only thing to learn via a device.

In my day job we make educational HTML games for kids learning english and math. A heap of schools use this as part of lessons, and we get a lot of extremely positive feedback from teachers.

As to whether an iPad is better than a computer? From a kid's UX, and IT infrastructure POV, tablets are generally seen as better/easier to use and maintain.

At home, I try to keep my kids off screens whenever I can though...

iPads in schools serve the exact same purpose macbooks did in the past, and its the same thing Google is doing with Chromebooks, albeit its not as bad.

Its buying new customers. If kids are literally raised on your products, you take them as yours before they even have money to buy computers in the first place. I went to a high school that used macbooks, and I'm probably the only person staunchly anti-Apple from my graduating class I know out of 50+ people - the vast majority of them are now primary Apple users over Windows, Android, Linux, etc.

Its not philanthropy, that's for sure.

I personally think its extremely important to get open, hackable hardware in the hands of students instead of some of the most locked down proprietary consumer devices to ever be pushed so aggressively on kids. For selfish reasons, because I don't want a proprietary world of tonka class computers and corporate controlled software - I want open platforms using open standards so I can use what I want and not be strong armed into some proprietary control by a business entity. The only way to get that is with an understanding and appreciation for hacker / open culture, and kids using ipads in class are definitely not getting exposure to anything like that.

You can program a computer using iPad or Chromebook, it just might not be the computer you are using.

But it might very well be. Just see Pythonista[0] as a great example for scripting on iOS.

[0]: http://omz-software.com/pythonista/

There are quite a few programming environments on the store, people just have to install them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com