coding teaches you to think; oops I meant algebra; no no, the humanities time to stop this nonsense; raccoons can think pretty well, I learned yesterday, when they scaled the fence, untied the string on the door to the coop, opened he lock, and ate the chickens after they had worked their way around the traps we learn to think by thinking and fixing our mistakes when things go wrong (or maybe the raccoons have learned to code) here is my old friend Alan Kay saying it best:
What did Mr. Kay say about st. Thomas Aquinas? Too short to claim he was wrong
Great video, but where's the rest of it?? Also, I've always stated rather emphatically that not everyone needs to learn how to code. For one thing, everyone simply 'can't' code - well. Its a writer's skill, which involves so many levels of understanding, comprehension, creativity, organization, and foresight...well, the list goes on. And, more importantly, more and more of our lives, our safety, and our well-being is being controlled and influenced by the things coders code everyday. Do we really want some 'Sunday hacker' telling those devices what to do? I know many 'coders'. So few are fantastic, elegant programmers. Some are merely good, and some are depressingly sloppy and mundane, even bad. Let's stop pretending that this is a skill everyone needs. We don't pretend that everyone needs to be a surgeon, or a CPA, do we? Only good coders should code for a living, and for our lives, everyone else can just be users.
Thinking happens in many ways. It is always easy to choose one way, for example logical and inductive, and claim “that’s not how thinking happens”, because there are many other ways of thinking. Truth is, to learn to code does teach you to think very logically! Coding however doesn’t teach you how to think emotionally.
Such and important point! I have involved myself in a number of conversations where I was met with consternation for pushing the idea that if we are to get students ready for what lies ahead, it's not about learning to code; it's about logic, it's about philosophy, that's what helps you to synthesize systems. And of course, we should never throw away the arts, be they liberal or fine, because that's where our unique humanity mixes with our engagement with the sciences for a true alchemy. It's quite a bill of goods being pushed on kids and parents, these coding camps and programs promising preparation for work that is already on the road to automation .
Thank you Roger Schank the most important line in your post (IMHO) is "we learn to think by thinking and fixing our mistakes when things go wrong". And I would extend that by recognizing that something HAD gone wrong (there is a difference between "wrong" and "not the expected result").
Have you got any more of his videos? I'd like to learn more. Thanks for sharing.
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Why should the opinion of this fellow have more weight than the Greeks or Saint Thomas de Aquinas...:) and why the video stopped when he was going to tell us what thinking is..:)