Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Growing up with AI

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 39 posts

Re: Growing up with AI

#21

Post by gaius »

GuiA wrote: post #8

One point that is not raised or discussed, which I think is important, is that these learning platforms are not “the real thing”. They’re just artificial environments with building blocks designed for making toy projects, but no engineer would ever use them to build something of significance. This is not to take away from the work - I’m a big fan of Cynthia Breazal’s group and the work her graduate students have done…

these learning platforms are not “the real thing”. They’re just artificial environments with building blocks designed for making toy projects, but no engineer would ever use them to build something of significance

It doesn’t have to be like that tho’. The original Beeb was designed for pedagogical uses sure, but people used them for “real work” too, including controlling lab experiments, machine tools, even financial applications. People used STs and Amiga’s for real work too.

Re: Growing up with AI

#22

Post by [deleted] »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #17
Retric wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An apprentice carpenter often does not use 'real' power tools. Nail guns for example are significantly more expensive and dangerous than a hammer, but also more specialized.

Students routinely are given machines/equipment/tools that is massive overkill for the task they are being asked to do so that it can be assured that their effort is spent learning instead of fighting their way around the limitations of their tools/equipment.

[deleted]

Re: Growing up with AI

#23

Post by Retric »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #17
Retric wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An apprentice carpenter often does not use 'real' power tools. Nail guns for example are significantly more expensive and dangerous than a hammer, but also more specialized.

Students routinely are given machines/equipment/tools that is massive overkill for the task they are being asked to do so that it can be assured that their effort is spent learning instead of fighting their way around the limitations of their tools/equipment.

An apprentice is not really just students in that they are paid reasonably well. That pay is based on the idea their going to get a job done reasonably efficiently while not breaking stuff or getting someone hurt.

Put another way, you generally don't give interns root access to production servers.

Re: Growing up with AI

#24

Post by [deleted] »

zawerf wrote: post #12

I am really jealous of what the more creative/motivated kids growing up today have access to. When I was a teenager not long ago, I was mostly motivated by cheating in games which got me learning basic scripting for keyboard/mouse macros which then led me to increasingly complicated stuff for botting. But there are so many more motivating factors for learning how to code today, and they have never been more accessibl…

[deleted]

Re: Growing up with AI

#25

Post by yorwba »

jerf wrote: post #20
GuiA wrote: post #8

One point that is not raised or discussed, which I think is important, is that these learning platforms are not “the real thing”. They’re just artificial environments with building blocks designed for making toy projects, but no engineer would ever use them to build something of significance. This is not to take away from the work - I’m a big fan of Cynthia Breazal’s group and the work her graduate students have done…

I've seen this sentiment expressed dozens of times, but I've never seen it manifested in an even remotely concrete way. I strongly suspect the essential complexity of programming is still too much for most people to pick up, and I even more strongly suspect that while Piaget's developmental model isn't necessarily perfect, that trying to create a programming language satisfactory for both the concrete operational sta…

If you don't want adult programmers to feel artificially limited by a language, it will of course have to be able to express concepts that are too difficult for 7-year-olds.

But that doesn't mean that every feature has to be that complex. The concept of typing commands into a Basic prompt was apparently not too difficult for many kids who were lucky enough to have access to a computer.

I think the crucial ingredient to make a feature easy to understand is the ability to see its effect, so that you can experiment with immediate feedback, and many common language features can actually be made to satisfy that requirement with the help of a sufficiently powerful debugger.

Re: Growing up with AI

#26

Post by ThomPete »

One of the things I love about voice interfaces the most is how they allow for us to remove abstraction between what we want technology to do for us and how we get it to do it.

The last major step we had for making technology more accessible and easy to use for more people was the touch screen which made it possible for anyone to understand what "click the button" or "drag the folder" means.

My kids speak with Google Home all the time. They get more and more creative with what they ask it for.

Furthermore, you can interact with it at naturally at a dinner table or in a meeting room without having to look down at a screen. It really just becomes a natural no-obstructive participant of the group of people which I think is going to be it's biggest

Whatever weirdness my generation feel around speaking to tech it will be totally normalized by the coming generations.

Re: Growing up with AI

#28

Post by jpk »

Jun8 wrote: post #10

This is a great project but I can't help say it: I don't like Scratch (and similar block-based languages). They are limited, in some cases by design (e.g. opening files in Scratch) but usually by their very nature. I very much prefer the safety wheel way of learning to ride a bike: use the real thing with addons until you don't need them. Maybe I'm wrong, any thoughts from people who worked with kids? I can give anec…

I've worked with kids from elementary to high school age. One of the obstacles for getting nearly any kid into coding is conditioning their response to things like syntax errors and the other obtuse-looking things compilers and interpreters like to spit out.

For example, a kid can spend an hour adding a tree of dialogue to their text-based dungeon crawler, only to get a compilation error they've never seen before. They might have forgotten a curly brace somewhere and I'll help them find it, then they give it another go only to find out they forgot a semicolon or misspelled a variable name. That series of events can be pretty demoralizing, and it takes some coaching to get them through.

The above is obviously a teachable moment to test early and often, but the point is kids often lose motivation in the face of errors they don't yet know how to interpret. On the other hand, kids get really interested when they can see the fruits of their labor come to life, which can happen without a lot of friction in Scratch.

So to give students a taste for that success without the slog through syntax errors and stuff, things like Scratch are fantastic. Especially for younger kids where attention span and getting bored or disinterested come more easily. We quickly move on to real languages, though, and the concepts they picked up in Scratch are easily portable to Python or whatever else.

Re: Growing up with AI

#29

Post by [deleted] »

yorwba wrote: post #25
jerf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this sentiment expressed dozens of times, but I've never seen it manifested in an even remotely concrete way. I strongly suspect the essential complexity of programming is still too much for most people to pick up, and I even more strongly suspect that while Piaget's developmental model isn't necessarily perfect, that trying to create a programming language satisfactory for both the concrete operational sta…

If you don't want adult programmers to feel artificially limited by a language, it will of course have to be able to express concepts that are too difficult for 7-year-olds. But that doesn't mean that every feature has to be that complex. The concept of typing commands into a Basic prompt was apparently not too difficult for many kids who were lucky enough to have access to a computer. I think the crucial ingredient…

[deleted]

Re: Growing up with AI

#30

Post by IggleSniggle »

GuiA wrote: post #8

One point that is not raised or discussed, which I think is important, is that these learning platforms are not “the real thing”. They’re just artificial environments with building blocks designed for making toy projects, but no engineer would ever use them to build something of significance. This is not to take away from the work - I’m a big fan of Cynthia Breazal’s group and the work her graduate students have done…

The best of these building blocks tools allow you (and encourage you!) to easily modify them under the hood.
Post reply on HN