Talk by Alan Kay
Novice programmers … about 2 pages of programs is about the max they can handle. They like to be able to spread it out and avoid relying on their short-term memory.
Circuit layout program…80 lines of code long in Smalltalk 72 by a 15 year old?!
Tim Gallwey, “The Inner Game of Tennis”, the classic guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance
Student: “When I started thinking, then I did worse!”
The instructor makes them hum/sing the rhythm. “Da da, dum” for a completely new thing called the serve! “I make them only think about getting the rhythm down, and so they aren't thinking Oh! This is what he is doing with his elbow, this is what he's doing with his arm, they're not trying to remember all that. Just matching the rhythm, and they see themselves doing very similar muscular movements to what I did. And they're not thinking about it, it just comes out naturally and fluently.”
It's easier to pick an image from a bulletin board than to pick an item out of a linear list.
Harmun? Experiment: Subjects shown 10000 images, spaced 10 seconds apart. 90% recall and good precision 30 days later. Wow…crazy!
Suzuki teaching children violin
“The piano can amplify musical impulse. We can only sing with one voice, but if we want to play a 4-part fugue, we need some tool to do that. The piano has been the biggest thing to turn people away from music for the rest of their lives. The music isn't in the piano! You first have to develop a curriculum based on ideas, and not on media. The media can only be an amplifier of the idea. People are teaching the medium and not the ideas!”
Molly (the lady learning tennis) ended up coming up with a way with Tim Gallwey to reduce her weight.
Kay recommends getting in touch with your kinesthetic/visual side, which is underemphasized in K-12 and college (esp. in USA). One option is a good liberal arts background. It is how many major scientists think and discover new ideas