alan kay

at bif09
interesting.. the cutting out of things, etc.. that we often think is wasting time in class - is really good for think time..
one of best mathematical activities at any age:
1) deriving 2 diff laws - law for smooth (linear) progressions - 1st order diffy q - discrete
2) 2nd order diff discrete relationship - squares
24 min in:
the real basis of calc you would wind up using in college
calc has nothing to do with algebra - even though cloked in alg for historic reasons
calc is quite separate from the symbology used on it

just happens to be what Babbage did - built a machine to compute those numbers
a way of computing all of the values of all of the polys of a certain order

at 19 - said i wish to god these calcs had been executed by steam
people make so many mistakes - we could build a machine to do this (reeking of comp based math)

mechanically integrating rather than symbolically integrating them
27 min in
the capture of change is more fundamental than the algebraic way of looking at it
Seymour Papert's great insight: if you have a machine that can help you do the integration - you can chop 10 years
change outlook to teaching real math that are built into human beings

everything in science is done by adding things (vectors)
because science is so messy - takes so much energy to deal with real world - no time for the symbolic math
28 min in
we have computers to we can do things based on ideas
but we're using them to imitate paper, expensive paper
basically - we're using them to automate the past

scratch and squeak etoys

and his 2009 Ted - a powerful idea about teaching kids
sounds like computerbasedmath via Conrad Wolfram


via @davidballpdx
who's at #bif10, read @kevin2kelly 's what tech wants and interacted with @plenk2010
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