[00:07.260 --> 00:09.840]  All right, what he said.
[00:11.980 --> 00:16.280]  I want to talk today, a rather sensational topic,
[00:16.280 --> 00:17.800]  the six-year-old hacker.
[00:18.820 --> 00:23.700]  We're obviously not talking about first-graders
[00:23.700 --> 00:26.740]  doing penetration testing or anything like that.
[00:26.740 --> 00:28.820]  This is my six-year-old hacker.
[00:28.820 --> 00:32.680]  There will be no first names,
[00:32.680 --> 00:35.240]  because everyone you'll see in my presentation,
[00:35.240 --> 00:40.060]  and if there are comments in the code that's on the CD,
[00:40.060 --> 00:44.020]  all those names have been changed to protect the innocent.
[00:44.180 --> 00:50.040]  What we are talking about is the way we educate,
[00:50.040 --> 00:52.640]  or the way we're using computer technology
[00:52.640 --> 00:54.900]  in elementary schools nowadays,
[00:54.900 --> 01:00.420]  and some of the shortcomings that I've come up against with that.
[01:00.540 --> 01:03.920]  I feel like sort of a crotchety old man.
[01:03.920 --> 01:05.720]  I don't think I'm that old,
[01:05.720 --> 01:11.880]  but I sort of look back at when I was a youngster and say,
[01:11.880 --> 01:16.140]  gee, when I was back in the day...
[01:16.140 --> 01:18.880]  Anyways, the way this whole thing started
[01:20.580 --> 01:26.120]  was one day after school, I was asking my daughter,
[01:26.120 --> 01:28.660]  so honey, what did you do today in school?
[01:28.660 --> 01:31.340]  And she went through the normal list of things,
[01:31.340 --> 01:33.880]  and then she said, ah, and then we worked on the computers.
[01:34.860 --> 01:38.440]  And I was sort of surprised, being the small school that it was,
[01:38.440 --> 01:41.780]  I didn't even at that point realize that they had a computer lab.
[01:41.780 --> 01:43.660]  I said, oh, really, what did you do?
[01:43.860 --> 01:46.440]  She said, well, we did Mavis B game.
[01:46.500 --> 01:48.640]  I was like, okay, yeah, that's cool.
[01:48.640 --> 01:50.040]  You should be learning how to type.
[01:50.140 --> 01:52.340]  Then she said, and then we played Math Blaster.
[01:52.340 --> 01:56.640]  I said, oh, God. No. No.
[01:56.640 --> 02:01.600]  So I very politely introduced myself to the person
[02:01.600 --> 02:05.140]  that was doing computer classes in the afternoon
[02:05.140 --> 02:09.640]  and offered my assistance to sort of bring the computer lab
[02:10.360 --> 02:13.700]  into some sort of consistent state of repair
[02:14.580 --> 02:18.300]  and then started insinuating myself into his lesson plan
[02:18.300 --> 02:21.060]  and after about three months asked him,
[02:21.060 --> 02:27.200]  so what would you think if I took on some of the third graders
[02:27.200 --> 02:28.980]  and did some programming with them?
[02:29.420 --> 02:31.300]  And he sort of scratched his head and said,
[02:31.300 --> 02:33.640]  well, I don't know, do you think that's possible?
[02:36.240 --> 02:39.360]  Really the thing that I see a lot,
[02:39.360 --> 02:42.180]  I work as a networking computer consultant
[02:42.180 --> 02:45.860]  and a few of my clients are school systems,
[02:46.360 --> 02:52.780]  is I see a lot of underutilization of technology in the schools.
[02:52.780 --> 02:56.480]  I see a lot of computer labs that are used
[02:56.480 --> 03:00.660]  for all sorts of very interesting purposes
[03:01.500 --> 03:05.740]  that I'm not really sure are central
[03:05.740 --> 03:09.940]  to the educational experiences of the children.
[03:12.260 --> 03:15.160]  There's a lot of what they call computer-based instruction
[03:15.520 --> 03:20.820]  in the schools that really has nothing specifically to do with computers.
[03:20.900 --> 03:23.280]  That's fine, a computer is a tool.
[03:23.940 --> 03:26.340]  There's nothing specific about a car
[03:30.120 --> 03:33.180]  that necessitates you using it to get to work.
[03:33.180 --> 03:37.900]  Some people commute by bicycle, some people have a subway, whatever.
[03:38.860 --> 03:40.700]  Your car is a tool.
[03:40.760 --> 03:44.740]  If you use a computer as a tool to educate kids, so be it.
[03:44.740 --> 03:46.920]  It doesn't have to be about the computer.
[03:48.700 --> 03:52.300]  But what I do see is I see a lot of computers in schools
[03:52.300 --> 03:56.820]  that are there just because somebody was able to get a grant to put them there.
[03:57.400 --> 04:00.260]  And this kind of disturbs me
[04:00.260 --> 04:05.800]  because no one is putting any real thought into what the computers are used for
[04:05.800 --> 04:09.460]  and the power that they could be applied to in the curriculum.
[04:11.620 --> 04:16.180]  I do see a lot of good use of computers in the school systems
[04:17.540 --> 04:20.880]  given that we're all going to be growing up with these things.
[04:20.880 --> 04:22.740]  Keyboarding skills are great.
[04:23.840 --> 04:27.140]  This interweb thingy is wonderful.
[04:27.980 --> 04:38.620]  I see a lot of bad orientation towards the Internet and research on the Internet.
[04:38.760 --> 04:43.420]  But done right, it's a wonderful thing.
[04:43.420 --> 04:49.840]  And it's a wonderful thing when a 7-year-old or an 8-year-old
[04:50.620 --> 04:53.320]  does a report for class
[04:53.320 --> 04:56.300]  and realizes that they can go back and change it
[04:56.300 --> 04:59.760]  without rewriting a whole page of handwritten text.
[05:00.080 --> 05:02.480]  I can't tell you how many times I hear,
[05:02.480 --> 05:04.720]  do I really have to retype all of that?
[05:06.980 --> 05:10.580]  There's also an awful lot of really horrible stuff
[05:10.860 --> 05:14.740]  that computers are getting used for in the schools.
[05:14.740 --> 05:20.640]  I see a lot of edutainment and drill and kill software,
[05:20.640 --> 05:22.760]  Math Blaster, things like this,
[05:22.760 --> 05:27.080]  that I don't see what the purpose of this software is
[05:27.760 --> 05:32.840]  beyond operating as an educational surrogate,
[05:32.840 --> 05:38.500]  replacing valuable time that the teacher could be spending with the students.
[05:39.980 --> 05:46.680]  I see an awful lot of really ugly use of computers in the schools.
[05:47.720 --> 05:50.820]  In one of the two states that I work in,
[05:50.820 --> 05:55.840]  and I shall remain nameless for the time being,
[05:55.840 --> 06:01.260]  some of the educational standards in middle and high school
[06:01.780 --> 06:09.700]  actually specify proficiency in Microsoft Office applications.
[06:09.700 --> 06:16.800]  They don't say that you should be able to create a presentation
[06:16.800 --> 06:20.920]  for the purposes of influencing or informing others.
[06:20.920 --> 06:25.660]  It says you need to be able to make a PowerPoint presentation.
[06:26.060 --> 06:28.780]  And it specifies PowerPoint.
[06:29.840 --> 06:33.440]  I see a lot of bad research done,
[06:33.440 --> 06:36.080]  especially at the junior high and high school levels.
[06:36.080 --> 06:41.700]  A lot of plagiarism and very little education as to
[06:42.280 --> 06:49.180]  what is proper citation and stuff like that.
[06:49.180 --> 06:54.900]  And I also see some really weak keyboarding training.
[06:55.040 --> 06:57.980]  But that's neither here nor there.
[06:57.980 --> 07:05.280]  Also, the environment in which the computers are used is less than ideal.
[07:05.280 --> 07:07.100]  We have these computer labs.
[07:07.100 --> 07:10.160]  Everything in the labs is locked down,
[07:10.160 --> 07:15.640]  and the students are encouraged not to change anything on their computers.
[07:15.640 --> 07:18.000]  From an instructional point of view,
[07:18.000 --> 07:20.460]  and from the limited knowledges of many of the people
[07:20.460 --> 07:26.460]  that are in charge of running these labs and these experiences,
[07:26.460 --> 07:29.260]  this is appropriate,
[07:29.260 --> 07:32.880]  because should the students get into something inappropriate
[07:32.880 --> 07:37.260]  or should they change something, they don't know how to deal with it.
[07:37.260 --> 07:42.640]  Also, I see a lot of computer use in after-school programs.
[07:42.720 --> 07:46.540]  I'm just going to gloss through this.
[07:46.800 --> 07:49.080]  Many of the same objections apply.
[07:50.160 --> 07:52.580]  Okay. Sorry.
[07:54.660 --> 07:57.160]  So, I was considering...
[07:57.160 --> 08:01.020]  I was thinking back to my childhood, or to my teen years,
[08:01.020 --> 08:07.520]  and thinking, you know, what was it about the early computers that really fascinated me?
[08:07.520 --> 08:10.460]  You know, my first S100 bus computer,
[08:10.460 --> 08:15.120]  and then later my first TI-44 and my Trash 80,
[08:15.120 --> 08:18.920]  the Wang that we had at the high school.
[08:19.280 --> 08:24.380]  And I really got jazzed on the idea of taking this computer
[08:24.380 --> 08:27.740]  that, when you powered it on, did nothing.
[08:27.740 --> 08:32.300]  It provided you with a prompt, and that was it.
[08:33.740 --> 08:36.300]  And I thought to myself, well, you know,
[08:36.300 --> 08:43.120]  what is it that the kids now are missing that we might be able to provide for them?
[08:43.200 --> 08:45.400]  And I was thinking back again, and I thought, you know,
[08:45.580 --> 08:48.620]  a lot of what I learned on the computers was self-taught,
[08:49.180 --> 08:51.500]  and a lot of it had to do with,
[08:51.500 --> 08:54.000]  okay, the computer doesn't do what I want it to do.
[08:54.000 --> 08:55.480]  I'll make it do it.
[08:57.660 --> 09:05.060]  So, I decided that what we were going to do is teach programming.
[09:05.060 --> 09:07.280]  And I started with third-graders.
[09:07.320 --> 09:11.040]  Last year, I expanded that to second-graders.
[09:11.040 --> 09:15.940]  And this coming year, I'll be working with first-graders.
[09:18.320 --> 09:21.340]  And the purpose behind this is,
[09:21.340 --> 09:28.700]  I think that this provides the ability for kids to really explore the environment that they're in,
[09:28.700 --> 09:34.180]  something that they're given very little opportunity to do in most educational systems.
[09:34.700 --> 09:37.620]  I'm lucky in that my children go to a Montessori school,
[09:37.620 --> 09:40.800]  and this is integral to the curriculum,
[09:40.800 --> 09:43.620]  and was very lacking in their dealings with computers.
[09:43.620 --> 09:50.440]  So, I was trying to bring this into the general philosophy of what was going on in the rest of the school.
[09:50.440 --> 09:56.680]  So, when I was challenged immediately by the directors of the school
[09:56.680 --> 10:01.840]  that it was ridiculous to try to teach computer programming to third-graders,
[10:01.840 --> 10:05.240]  I said, no, really, I do think I can do it.
[10:05.240 --> 10:09.560]  In fact, it's been being done since the 1960s.
[10:11.400 --> 10:15.500]  So, I've started these computer classes.
[10:15.500 --> 10:18.180]  I take six to 11-year-olds,
[10:19.240 --> 10:24.000]  and I try to teach them that when you turn on the computer,
[10:24.000 --> 10:28.540]  it's not just for running prepackaged applications.
[10:28.540 --> 10:30.340]  It's not just for gaming.
[10:30.340 --> 10:32.680]  It's not just for exploring the web.
[10:32.680 --> 10:36.780]  And it's not just for that boring stuff that your parents do,
[10:36.780 --> 10:41.660]  like spreadsheets and paying the bills and stuff like that.
[10:41.660 --> 10:46.900]  The tool that I chose to use is Logo Programming Language,
[10:46.900 --> 10:51.890]  written at least in part by Seymour Papert back in the 1960s at MIT.
[10:52.420 --> 10:59.260]  And there are some nice versions of that that run under just about any platform you can imagine.
[10:59.260 --> 11:05.920]  UCB Logo runs under Mac and Linux,
[11:05.920 --> 11:11.660]  and there's MSW Windows, which is a derivative of UCB Logo,
[11:11.660 --> 11:13.680]  that runs under Windows.
[11:13.960 --> 11:16.560]  One of the things that you learn immediately
[11:16.560 --> 11:20.600]  when you sit a kid down in front of a computer
[11:20.600 --> 11:23.580]  and teach them the very rudiments,
[11:23.580 --> 11:28.040]  even the first three or four commands that they learn in a programming language,
[11:28.040 --> 11:34.120]  is they get really jazzed on the fact that they just made the computer do something.
[11:34.120 --> 11:38.060]  That they typed in some words,
[11:38.060 --> 11:44.140]  and the computer followed the instructions that they gave it and did something.
[11:44.140 --> 11:51.140]  They start to learn that this thing that they've only really thought of as a game console or an appliance
[11:51.140 --> 11:54.380]  really might have some other possibilities.
[11:55.600 --> 11:58.500]  The other thing that I did is,
[11:58.500 --> 12:06.820]  after I exposed the kids to programming in the formalized classes,
[12:06.820 --> 12:14.560]  I have an after-school program that they have named the Geek Dojo or Otakudo.
[12:14.560 --> 12:19.240]  My apologies to any Japanese speakers.
[12:19.460 --> 12:24.580]  That is a voluntary program open to all ages.
[12:24.580 --> 12:29.740]  We have 5-year-olds through 13-year-olds currently attending.
[12:29.960 --> 12:35.620]  It's a self-selecting program in which the students set themselves goals
[12:36.410 --> 12:41.320]  and work with me or work with older students to try to achieve those goals.
[12:41.320 --> 12:44.020]  Most of those are programming-oriented goals,
[12:44.020 --> 12:47.360]  but a lot of them have to do with more abstract stuff.
[12:47.620 --> 12:51.320]  A lot of the kids are interested in cryptography.
[12:51.320 --> 12:57.560]  A lot of them are interested, especially when you start to get to the 10- and 11-year-olds,
[12:57.560 --> 13:01.240]  into computer security.
[13:01.620 --> 13:07.620]  And a lot of them are interested in more mathematical pursuits
[13:08.320 --> 13:15.420]  that are more or less related to geeky stuff.
[13:15.420 --> 13:22.380]  I also run a summer school which is patterned after the programming classes,
[13:22.380 --> 13:28.560]  but is concentrated on a specific project for two weeks.
[13:29.280 --> 13:41.420]  The major thrust of all of this is to awaken some of the inherent hacking spirit
[13:41.420 --> 13:46.980]  that I think naturally exists in all children and to cultivate it.
[13:46.980 --> 13:54.640]  Because I think that a lot of this in our current environment is not being encouraged
[13:54.640 --> 14:02.460]  and a lot of kids that would develop these interests are in fact just going home
[14:02.460 --> 14:09.900]  and playing Xbox and not really realizing what other things there are out there.
[14:09.900 --> 14:13.680]  So we have a motto at Otakudo.
[14:13.680 --> 14:17.300]  It's fun to have fun, but you have to know how.
[14:18.980 --> 14:21.680]  So what sort of results am I getting?
[14:23.180 --> 14:26.300]  We start from the very basics in the programming class.
[14:26.300 --> 14:32.380]  I talk about immediately what is a program, why do we do it,
[14:32.380 --> 14:38.820]  and in fact when we start talking about programming we don't even deal with computers.
[14:38.820 --> 14:42.900]  Here's the first exercise that I give the students.
[14:42.900 --> 14:47.380]  They have to look at this picture and write me a set of instructions
[14:47.380 --> 14:54.440]  so I can select the right blocks out of the box and build this object for them.
[14:55.860 --> 14:58.320]  Obviously, hilarity results.
[14:58.580 --> 15:04.800]  And this actually takes an hour before they can program me properly to build this object.
[15:06.140 --> 15:10.060]  As I said earlier, I use the logo programming language,
[15:10.060 --> 15:14.660]  which is based on what are known as turtle graphics,
[15:14.660 --> 15:17.940]  which is important because this is accessible to young children
[15:17.940 --> 15:21.700]  because the graphics are all relative motion graphics,
[15:21.700 --> 15:24.500]  or at least they are at the beginning.
[15:24.500 --> 15:31.340]  You have a sprite on the screen that for historic reasons is referred to as a turtle
[15:31.340 --> 15:40.660]  that follows commands like forward, right turn, left turn, pen up, pen down, things of this sort.
[15:41.440 --> 15:45.620]  Most six-year-olds, and the majority of five-year-olds,
[15:45.620 --> 15:54.660]  can write you a simple program to draw you a square within the first 60-minute class
[15:54.660 --> 15:58.700]  given a collection of 40 commands.
[15:58.700 --> 16:01.060]  And here are some of the results.
[16:01.060 --> 16:02.720]  This is actual code written.
[16:02.720 --> 16:11.020]  None of the code up here is written by anyone older than seven years old.
[16:12.760 --> 16:17.440]  I have to admit, I did some indenting for clarity on two of the programs.
[16:18.680 --> 16:26.580]  The person on the left, again, who shall remain nameless, is the namesake of the talk.
[16:26.580 --> 16:29.000]  She is my six-year-old hacker.
[16:29.040 --> 16:32.540]  She is an amazing cryptographer.
[16:32.640 --> 16:41.540]  She is now seven and cracking double replacement ciphers
[16:41.540 --> 16:47.280]  on the basis of frequency patterns and things like that.
[16:47.280 --> 16:50.940]  On the right, you see some of my older students
[16:50.940 --> 16:56.420]  who are actually, in this photograph, constructing the web proxy
[16:56.420 --> 17:02.920]  that their school uses, of course, with some guidance.
[17:04.520 --> 17:11.820]  Other projects that they've done is that they've programmed their own games,
[17:11.820 --> 17:14.060]  worked with the Lego Mindstorms,
[17:14.060 --> 17:17.980]  and one of my particularly math-oriented kids
[17:17.980 --> 17:26.500]  really became fascinated with geodesics and geodesic periodicities.
[17:27.140 --> 17:31.680]  I tried to integrate this with their other class work.
[17:31.680 --> 17:40.060]  They did a semester on crystals in the upper grades, the fourth and fifth grades,
[17:40.060 --> 17:47.960]  and they worked on programs to create octahedral crystals.
[17:47.960 --> 17:50.920]  We didn't get to the tetrahedral crystals, unfortunately.
[17:51.460 --> 17:57.500]  And even within the last class, I'm afraid I don't have anaglyph glasses,
[17:57.500 --> 18:02.400]  but they even did three-dimensional crystals for us.
[18:03.860 --> 18:12.400]  If anyone's interested, this is sort of the progression of the skills
[18:12.400 --> 18:21.140]  that I've found empirically that various students are able to grasp at various ages.
[18:21.140 --> 18:22.570]  Some of these are ranges.
[18:23.500 --> 18:33.020]  Yellow sort of denotes when I can expect the most gifted students to pick up a concept,
[18:33.020 --> 18:37.160]  and green, when I can expect an entire population of students.
[18:37.160 --> 18:49.220]  I want to just show you some quick examples of some code that some of my kids have written.
[18:53.700 --> 19:04.400]  This was actually written by a five-year-old class after about three days of work in a summer class.
[19:07.980 --> 19:22.370]  Okay, not working. Maybe not.
[19:35.910 --> 19:41.010]  Okay, I'm going to just go on to some more advanced examples here.
[19:44.510 --> 20:06.370]  Okay, one of the challenges that I put to one of my programming classes,
[20:06.370 --> 20:09.510]  and this was a group of fourth graders,
[20:09.510 --> 20:17.830]  was to get their turtle, which is this triangular sprite down here in the corner,
[20:17.830 --> 20:22.170]  to navigate a maze, a simple maze.
[20:22.590 --> 20:31.330]  And this was their first attempt, which did a fair decent job at first.
[20:31.330 --> 20:35.570]  They figured out that if you bumped into a wall, you needed to back up and turn.
[20:35.570 --> 20:39.390]  But obviously, there were problems.
[20:45.570 --> 20:51.550]  The second attempt, they figured, okay, well, if I always turn the same amount,
[20:51.550 --> 20:55.110]  then perhaps that's going to get me stuck.
[20:55.110 --> 20:59.310]  So this time, I'll try a random turn.
[20:59.450 --> 21:06.690]  And believe it or not, if you wait long enough, it's rather unsatisfying.
[21:06.690 --> 21:11.870]  But yes, in fact, your turtle will navigate to the end of the maze.
[21:18.600 --> 21:24.090]  So it took them about four one-hour classes to finally figure out
[21:24.750 --> 21:36.750]  the excruciating 15 lines of code that was necessary to create a wall-following...
[21:36.750 --> 21:39.230]  Whoops, I got the wrong one.
[21:40.090 --> 21:41.590]  Let's just hold that.
[21:51.330 --> 21:52.690]  Here we go.
[21:52.750 --> 21:54.810]  That followed a right-hand rule.
[21:56.570 --> 22:03.150]  There's a false start, but as you can see, it finally does set off in the right direction.
[22:03.150 --> 22:05.190]  And as you can... I'll just let that go.
[22:05.190 --> 22:11.090]  And as you can see, it will reach its destination being the end.
[22:11.090 --> 22:11.990]  There you go.
[22:13.950 --> 22:18.810]  The other things that we've done is, as I said,
[22:18.810 --> 22:21.070]  I just have just a minute here.
[22:21.070 --> 22:25.150]  I do want to leave some time for questions.
[22:28.970 --> 22:31.450]  No, in fact, I don't have time to do that one.
[22:31.450 --> 22:35.190]  But they have done some simple side-scroller,
[22:35.190 --> 22:39.810]  sort of like old-school 8-bit side-scroller games using Logo,
[22:39.810 --> 22:43.130]  which was very impressive, the group of four students.
[22:43.130 --> 22:44.830]  One of the interesting things...
[22:44.830 --> 22:53.530]  I was listening to talk two speakers ago about women and hacking,
[22:53.530 --> 22:56.810]  is that actually at this age that I'm working with children,
[22:56.810 --> 23:01.150]  especially at the younger grade levels, third and fourth grade,
[23:02.390 --> 23:08.570]  there is a real curiosity, a real thirst on the part of the girls
[23:08.570 --> 23:13.170]  to get involved in this stuff, to manipulate the computers,
[23:13.170 --> 23:15.670]  to have the power to do this stuff over the computers.
[23:15.670 --> 23:18.890]  There are some differences in the projects I see them choose.
[23:18.890 --> 23:22.770]  Boys love the shoot-em-up games, love to program games,
[23:22.770 --> 23:29.050]  while girls love to do sort of interactive story-based games,
[23:29.050 --> 23:32.410]  to program interactive story-based games or movies,
[23:32.410 --> 23:36.530]  or to do things, mathematically-based challenges,
[23:36.530 --> 23:40.430]  such as cryptanalysis and stuff like that.
[23:40.430 --> 23:45.710]  But what I really want to give you as the takeaway message here
[23:48.170 --> 23:59.450]  is that this is a really different way, at least in my experience,
[23:59.450 --> 24:03.450]  of computers being used in the elementary schools
[24:03.450 --> 24:07.250]  than we've seen recently.
[24:07.250 --> 24:13.590]  There's been a real dumbing down of the computer lab from when I went to school.
[24:14.030 --> 24:18.290]  And this gets back to the idea that the computer is a tool
[24:18.290 --> 24:26.390]  not only to advance your education and to get further information off the Internet,
[24:26.390 --> 24:30.450]  but is a tool for exploration in itself.
[24:31.290 --> 24:36.330]  The kids really become very motivated and very self-driven
[24:36.330 --> 24:38.550]  in these projects that they come up with.
[24:38.550 --> 24:43.150]  And most of the projects are the ones that they choose for themselves.
[24:43.150 --> 24:48.550]  They, even as they get older, really get into things like hardware maintenance
[24:48.550 --> 24:54.850]  and taking responsibility for the computer environment at the school.
[24:54.910 --> 24:59.870]  Right now, of course, with my supervision and making sure that everything is proper
[24:59.870 --> 25:07.610]  and well-designed, my older students, and we're talking 12 and 13-year-olds,
[25:07.610 --> 25:11.170]  have taken over responsibility for maintaining the workstations
[25:11.170 --> 25:19.150]  and building and installing, if not maintaining, proxies and firewalls
[25:19.430 --> 25:22.050]  and things like that.
[25:23.150 --> 25:27.790]  I think what I really want as the takeaway message here
[25:27.790 --> 25:31.570]  is that I'd really like to continue a discussion with this
[25:31.570 --> 25:35.830]  with anyone that would like to contact me afterwards.
[25:36.430 --> 25:39.350]  I really want to know how we can expand the reach.
[25:39.350 --> 25:47.630]  I find that school systems don't really have the resources to do things like this
[25:47.630 --> 25:53.470]  unless they have rather remarkable teachers involved.
[25:53.470 --> 25:57.090]  Not saying that I'm remarkable, I just happen to have the free time.
[25:59.190 --> 26:02.990]  There's a real problem in using this sort of model in a public school.
[26:02.990 --> 26:06.330]  As I said, I did this in a private Montessori school.
[26:06.610 --> 26:09.850]  In the public schools, at least in Illinois and Missouri,
[26:09.850 --> 26:13.990]  there is such a demand to teach to the test,
[26:13.990 --> 26:17.690]  even at the elementary and middle school levels,
[26:17.690 --> 26:24.550]  that there is an enormous reticence to add anything extra to the curriculum.
[26:25.230 --> 26:30.170]  And that brings up the question, well, do you write a curriculum or do you not?
[26:30.890 --> 26:37.350]  I think possibly one of the venues of this might be taking it outside of the schools,
[26:37.350 --> 26:43.950]  but I do like the immediacy of having it within the educational environment of the school.
[26:43.950 --> 26:48.670]  Also, I'm beginning to explore the possibilities of this sort of approach
[26:48.670 --> 26:53.450]  with some learning disabled children that we have at the Montessori school
[26:53.450 --> 26:59.390]  that simply have been brought into the program later as their abilities have seen fit,
[26:59.390 --> 27:05.090]  but I actually think there's a real possibility of working with them earlier.
[27:06.310 --> 27:10.810]  And again, working possibly with even younger hackers, of course.
[27:10.810 --> 27:13.310]  There's the question of spelling and typing.
[27:15.450 --> 27:21.330]  These are a few of the people, my wife and daughter, who really got me involved in this.
[27:21.330 --> 27:29.130]  My wife making it possible to quit my day job to pursue my consulting and teaching.
[27:29.670 --> 27:34.950]  The administrators of the school, Jane and Rod Connell,
[27:34.950 --> 27:39.150]  who gave me the opportunity to use their students as a guinea pig.
[27:39.150 --> 27:44.910]  And many of the influences on what I've been talking about.
[27:45.030 --> 27:50.530]  Here's my contact information. I'm not even sure I've left time for questions.
[28:00.280 --> 28:05.860]  The question was, how long have I been doing this and does it correlate to the data analysis?
[28:05.860 --> 28:12.820]  I have been doing this for two and a half school years. I started in January.
[28:13.820 --> 28:20.880]  And to call it data analysis is really... yeah.
[28:21.740 --> 28:25.280]  That's very empirical data.
[28:30.080 --> 28:34.060]  That's very qualitative data.
[28:34.060 --> 28:39.400]  I have been keeping records, which could be analyzed in more depth,
[28:39.400 --> 28:43.440]  but those are really impressionistic data that I was showing there.
[28:57.120 --> 29:00.540]  Right. That's a really good question.
[29:00.540 --> 29:05.760]  What does teaching children Logo as a programming language prepare them for?
[29:05.760 --> 29:06.880]  Nothing.
[29:07.840 --> 29:11.740]  What it does is it's a tool.
[29:13.060 --> 29:17.820]  It's a tool sort of in the same way that computers are a tool.
[29:17.820 --> 29:22.480]  It gives them the foundations of a programming method.
[29:22.480 --> 29:29.300]  I would not recommend Logo to anyone as a programming language for any sort of large project.
[29:29.300 --> 29:40.260]  Even in the game design, when my older students came back for summer class this year,
[29:40.260 --> 29:44.140]  and we started working on our second game,
[29:44.140 --> 29:50.700]  the consensus was, gee, the game we made last year really sucked.
[29:51.720 --> 29:57.420]  And that was largely a function of the limitations of Logo.
[29:57.420 --> 30:02.000]  I will say, however, that it teaches them the fundamentals of programming,
[30:02.000 --> 30:05.500]  programming structures, things like that.
[30:06.280 --> 30:13.020]  I have kids writing binary search trees in Logo, things like that.
[30:13.020 --> 30:21.000]  And I have my older kids working in Java now.
[30:21.000 --> 30:24.240]  I think I'm getting kicked out here.
[30:24.640 --> 30:25.840]  Okay.
[30:26.240 --> 30:27.780]  Okay.
[30:27.780 --> 30:29.920]  Any more questions?
[30:32.280 --> 30:34.620]  Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
[30:55.800 --> 30:58.000]  That's correct.
[31:25.960 --> 31:27.640]  That's absolutely right.
[31:27.640 --> 31:33.680]  If anyone didn't hear that, he was saying that schools don't have computer teachers anymore.
[31:34.080 --> 31:40.220]  They usually have a technology coordinator, which is the fancy word that most schools use for it,
[31:40.220 --> 31:43.860]  who is half technician and half administrator.
[31:44.540 --> 31:49.100]  And this is what I'm trying to get back to.
[31:49.100 --> 31:57.960]  In the public schools, if anyone has any idea how to convince public educators
[31:57.960 --> 32:03.700]  that teaching computers as computers is still of value.
[32:04.680 --> 32:07.080]  Yeah, I'm afraid so.
[32:07.920 --> 32:09.420]  Thank you.