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• Monday, September 25, 2006 09:59 AM

  Great Ideas in Computer Science

  18 September 2006

  Dear Mr. Brin and readers,

  I sympathize tremendously with your article about bringing back

  BASIC for young people to use on modern machines. I am sure it will

  be straightforward as you suggest for Microsoft, Apple, and the

  others to provide us with BASIC language facilities on our machines

  and that it would be a huge benefit for many of our young people.

  Absent that alternative for the short term, I do offer some solutions.

  Specifically, I have written a book (with co-author Dietolf

  Ramm) called "Great Ideas in

  Computer Science" (The MIT Press) which shows beginners how to get started in

  computing. It features an introduction to Java with just a few

  constructs and young coders can learn them and use them. I felt

  that making programs callable from the web would quadruply add

  to the fun and so everything is coded in applets. When you run

  a program, you enter via the web and the applet interpreter comes

  up on the screen. You have buttons which activate your program

  features and you can do computations or draw pictures. My assistants

  decided to streamline some features and wrote code to implement

  some easy input-output capabilities. That code is down loadable from my website at www.cs.duke.edu/~awb.

  I have a grandchild coming along and when she hits maybe age 6 or 7,

  I will show her the features in our chapter 5 on graphics. It is

  pretty easy to write code to put a rectangle or circle or line or

  text string on the screen in any color you can imagine. The item you want will come up at the given coordinates and at a push of

  the right button (which you have labelled properly). So she will be

  able to draw pictures on the screen in early grammar school. From

  there, I will show her looping and conditional facilities so she

  can draw many squares or circles. And subroutines are easy after that.

  Then it should be straightforward to introduce numbers and numerical

  computation. We have taught the foundations of computer science to

  thousands of college students and I feel that a modification of our

  approach will work for younger people.

  In your letter, you talk also about the other levels of knowledge

  that go with computing: machine architecture, assembly language,

  operating systems, networking, and so forth. These are covered in

  the later chapters of our book. We end with several chapters on

  the limitations of computing: execution time of programs, noncomputability, and programability. So my sympathies with your

  points are strong and I have worked very hard to address the

  problems.

  I will close with an antecdote about my son who turned 14

  in the early 1990s and I had a path for him to

  follow. He had a passion for computer games and his unfeeling dad

  would give him few opportunities to play them. We had been, for

  years, walking past the darkened room at the shopping center where colored lights were flashing and bells were ringing with

  my son leaning longingly in that direction. I had little sympathy.

  But at some point, he asked for his own computer and I decided to

  buy him a book on how to assemble your own 486. Then I took him

  to the local computer store and agreed to buy any parts that he

  needed. The computer store folks were glad to help out and he spent

  a few Saturday mornings there screwing the thing together, plugging

  in boards, and bringing up the Microsoft operating system. Then

  he obtained some cool computer games and he played them until the

  keyboard was nearly worn out. In his high school, he had some introduction to programming and he was on his way. Ever after and

  wherever he has gone he has been the local guru who can fix your

  machine if it does not work and get whatever computation done that

  needs it.

  So there are many routes to computer competency and I

  suggest two here. But I also agree that we should bring back BASIC!!!

  Thank you for your thoughtful article,

  Alan Biermann

  Professor Emeritus

  Department of Computer Science

  Duke University

  —jmwheele Read jmwheele's other letters
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