expressive power for the ordinary user

Wait…so the coupling of laptop meets ipad was invented in the 1970’s but never made headway? Really? I am confused as to whether this Dynabook ever made the market, but from the sounds of the article it was simply an idea. Using a pen on a display screen to draw This is so far in the future for an invention from the seventies! The macbook meets photoshop meets etc- a-sketch meets doctor databases.

“Expressive power to be useful to an ordinary user. At that time we became interested in focusing on children as our “user community.” We were greatly encouraged by the Bolt
Beranek and Newman/MIT Logo work that uses a robot turtle that draws on paper, a CRT version of the turtle, and a single music generator to get kids to program.”


“Second, the kids love it! The interactive nature of the dialogue, the fact that they are in control, the feeling that they are doing real things rather than playing with toys or working out “assigned” problems, the pictorial and auditory nature of their results, all contribute to a tremendous sense of accomplishment to their experience. The kids, on the other hand, are used to finger-paints, water colors, color television, real musical instruments, and records. “
This quote makes me think of Leapfrog the educational computer game for children. Even books with talking characters, the Disney books that have a button with the Lion King on it roaring gets the attention of a child because it’s interactive, they make something happen and get a result!
Working with kids for most of my adult life, I’ve noticed how addicted children get to video games, and that their attention is kept much longer doing things interactively. It makes complete sense, as adults we can spend hours shopping, online or in a group meeting discussing ideas, but get us in a room solitary doing one task, our minds tend to wander. I believe this same concept applies to children, but the idea that resonates with me was….
“Mathematics could become a living language in which children could cause exciting things to happen. “ I’ve seen programs on the Mac home computer that have games where a child can be an animal in the forest ‘discovering’ things in a scene of their choice. The scene is an opportunity to do math, using their character of choice. They find five butterflies in a jungle or un-turn flowers in a specific order ect.

“What would happen in a world in which everyone had a Dynabook?.A composer could hear his composition while it was in progress, particularly if it were more complex than he was able to play. He could also bypass the incredibly tedious chore of redoing the score and producing the parts by hand. Learning to play music could be aided by being able to capture and hear one’s own attempts and compare them against expert renditions. “This conclusion was striking and undeniable. We have ultimately created many of these ideas, however the key difference I noticed in the article was that children-teenagers were given the chance to program and bring ideas to workshops. I love love love this idea! I especially loved the music program that you can orchestrate with a mouse and then replay with the keyboard and alter the music this way.