Here Come the Microkids
By Frederic Golden
COVER STORY
By bits and bytes, the new generation spearheads an electronic revolution
The day is officially over at Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in Ridgewood, N.J., but a handful of students are still hard at work. They are "Muller's disciples," followers of a popular math teacher named Bob Muller, 30, who heads Benjamin Franklin's computer program. Oblivious to the clang of the last class bell, the disciples are hunched over their desktop computers, while long reams of paper clatter out of printers and green phosphorescent TV screens dance with ciphers and letters.
George Mamunes, 14, a gangling ninth-grader dressed in flannel shirt, blue jeans and hiking boots, knits his thick, dark eyebrows while putting the finishing touches on a computer program, already nearly 300 lines long. For those uninitiated in the special languages of the computer age, it looks like a hopeless mess of numerical gibberish. But when completed, these arcane instructions should produce a computer image of the heart detailed enough to show every major artery and vein, as well as valves and chambers. The electronic heart is part of a teaching tool George is putting together for eighth-grade biology classes.
A few feet away sits Pam Miller, 14, a ninth-grader with long, brown hair draped far down her back. She is operating a computer program--or software--that simulates the workings of a nuclear reactor. Today she is fine-tuning the section that governs the control rods, those regulators of the reactor's nuclear fires. Tapping away at the keyboard, Pam explains: "You have to maximize the power output without destroying the reactor." Suddenly, flashing numbers burst upon the screen. "There," says Pam, her face lighting up. "Reactor overheated. Power output low. Reactor core damaged. Meltdown!" A disaster that she has brought on intentionally, just to show how it could happen.
Other disciples, seated at terminals scattered around the room, are no less absorbed. Meilin Wong, 15, chic in blue velour blouse, jeans and Bass moccasins, is trying to figure out what went wrong with her business data-management program. She is an old hand at such troubleshooting, having spent much of last semester "debugging" a program that, when printed out, stretches over 30 ft. Jim McGuire, 13, is creating a video game called Spaceship, which will let electronic star warriors zap a boxy-looking orbital intruder. A more mundane program is emerging from 15-year-old Dave McCann's terminal: a verb test for seventh-and eighth-grade Spanish classes. Off in a corner two youngsters are putting the impish face of Mad magazine's cartoon hero, Alfred E. Neuman, onto the computer screen.
Says Muller, as he presides proudly over these after-hours computer converts: "No one told them they have to be here. They're not usually doing assignments. They're experimenting. They're letting their imaginations run free."
Muller's disciples are not all math whizzes. Or straight-A students. Or particularly precocious. They are reasonably normal youngsters who have grown up with computers. For them, in ways that few people over 30 can understand, manipulating these complex machines is as natural as riding a bike, playing baseball or even solving Rubik's cube. Like thousands of others across the country, they are part of a revolutionary vanguard: the computer generation. Not only is this generation propelling traditional education down promising avenues, it is tugging at the entire social fabric, foreshadowing changes at least as startling and momentous as those ushered in by a new generation of automobile users more than a half-century ago.
In the classroom, where youngsters are being introduced to the machines as early as kindergarten, they astound--and often outpace--their teachers with their computer skills. After school they gather at the mushrooming number of computer stores (more than 1,500 at last count) or join the computer clubs that are becoming a regular part of the youthful landscape. Huddling around any available machine, they argue over their programs, thresh out computer problems and swap software as intensely as kids once haggled over baseball cards. In the summer, they may even go off to computer camps, another growth industry, and if they are Boy Scouts, they may try for a computer merit badge.
During mischievous moments, they may tinker with one another's programs, writing in steps' that will flash an unexpected insult or obscenity across a buddy's video screen. Some try to pick the encoded electronic locks on copyrighted software, taking glee in outwitting their elders, or spin fanciful plots to break into computer networks. A few turn their skills to profit by showing baffled businessmen how to get idle, new computers to run, or by establishing Delaware-based corporations to market their own software creations. To the bafflement of their parents, they talk in a jargon of their own ("Hey, Charlie, you should have POKEd instead of PEEKed").*
As with so many other changes in contemporary life, the spark for this revolution is technological: a bit of silicon sophistication variously known as the personal, home or microcomputer. No larger than an attache case, apart from its video screen, this mighty mite packs the computing power of machines that two decades ago occupied a full room. Yet the micros, as they are affectionately called, are a relative bargain to buy and are becoming steadily cheaper. Many models cost under $1,000, bringing them within reach of schools, parents or the children themselves. Last week, in the sharpest price break yet, Timex announced it will begin selling a small home computer for a suggested retail price of $99.95.
But size and price cannot explain why computers have taken such a strong hold on so many youngsters. Certainly their interest has been stirred by a related rage, video games, whose computer-generated flashes, zaps and pings have not only all the appeal pinball machines had for their elders but go a significant step further: they pique young minds to learn more about all that electronic prestidigitation. But many experts, and most of the young operatives, agree that the overwhelming attraction of the machines is the lure of control, the pleasure of being able to think out and then make something happen, a satisfaction all too often denied children.
Lewis Stewart, 14, a black ninth-grader at Manhattan's P.S. 118, reads at a fifth-grade level, yet mastering his school's computers was literally child's play for him. Recognized by students and teachers alike as his school's best computer programmer, Lewis works afternoons as an instructor for a computer consulting firm, introducing younger children to the machines. Last year his employers sent him to Chicago, where he displayed his special teaching gifts before a meeting of educators. As Lewis told TIME Correspondent Peter Stoler, "I love these machines. I've got all this power at my fingertips. Without computers, I don't know what I'd be. With them, I'm somebody."
Perhaps because of the faintly macho side of computers, the bug seems to strike many more boys than girls in the preadolescent years. Says Steve Siegelbaum, Lewis' teacher: "Maybe it's because boys are pushed more toward math and logic than girls are. Maybe it's because boys are just more aggressive."
Paradoxically, the computer passion is often stirred in youngsters who seem least likely to be interested in high tech. Jay Harstad, 12, of Minnetonka, Minn., Utters his house with poems and sketches but will do almost anything to avoid doing his math homework. Yet Jay is one of the Gatewood Elementary School's premier computerniks and regularly helps teachers introduce fourth-graders to the machines. At West High School in Wausau, Wis., Chris Schumann, 16, a junior, has made a name for himself by translating musical notes into digital form and getting a computer to play Bach and Vivaldi through its loudspeaker. Originally, Chris regarded computers as remote and forbidding, but that changed when he was introduced to his first micro. "It looked real friendly," he says. "It didn't overpower you. It wasn't this ominous thing but something you could get close to."
The closeness can be contagious. Explains Nick Newman, 15, Muller's chief disciple at Ridgewood: "The more you do on the machine, the more enjoyable it gets. It becomes habit forming." In Alpena, Mich., youngsters who had learned computer skills in junior high were devastated when they got to senior high school and found too few machines to go around. Says Alpena Elementary School Principal Burt Wright: "I've got high school kids begging to come in after school and use our machine." The truly addicted--known half scornfully, half admiringly as computer nerds--may drop out almost entirely from the everyday world. In Lexington, Mass., one legendary 16-year-old nerd got so deeply immersed in computers that he talked to no one, headed straight to his terminal after school and barely sat down for meals. The only way his father could get him away from the terminal was to go down to the cellar and throw the house's main power switch, cutting off all electricity.
Barry Porter, 14, of San Francisco, is a computer-age truant, so attached to the machine that he often skips school, rarely reads anything other than computer manuals and hangs out with his pals in a Market Street computer store, often plotting some new electronic scam. Barry (not his real name) currently boasts an illicit library of about 1,000 pirated (i.e., illegally copied) programs worth about $50,000 at retail prices, including such software gems as VisiCalc, the popular business management and planning program. Before security was tightened up, he regularly plugged his computer into such distant databanks as The Source (which provides news bulletins, stock prices, etc.) via telephone without paying a cent.
No one can say exactly when the computer generation began--certainly not earlier than the 1960s, when computers began appearing in schools. But even computer whizzes in their 20s are acutely aware of how soon they are Likely to be outstripped by today's grade schoolers. Says Steven Jobs, 27, the multimillionaire co-founder of Apple Computer Inc.: "These kids know more about the new software than I do." New York Computer Executive Charles Lecht goes further: "If you were born before 1965, boy, you're going to be out of it."
Where their parents fear to tread, the microkids plunge right in, no more worried about pushing incorrect buttons or making errors than adults are about dialing a wrong telephone number. Says Mathematician Louis Robinson, IBM's resident computer sage: "They know what computers can and cannot do, while adults still regard them as omnipotent." Says Hughes Aircraft Chairman Allen Puckett, who shares an Apple with Son Jim, 12: "A lot of adults grew up in a slide-rule world and still reject computers. But computers are as natural to kids as milk and cookies."
More and more members of the computer generation are tasting the heady pleasure of teaching their own teachers how to use the machines and, if they are lucky enough to have computers at home, instructing their parents as well. Says Ridgewood's Newman, a regular teacher of teachers: "It's a sort of mutual doorway. The barriers between adult and child, between teacher and student, are broken, and it's person to person. Nobody's looking down on anyone; they're looking each other right in the eye."
Often adults find it easier to ask a child how to do something than to ask another adult. Says University of Kansas Education Professor Mary Kay Corbitt: "One adult student of mine brought her son to computer class, and I discovered that he was doing her assignment while she watched. Two weeks later she overcame her anxieties and was participating fully." Confronted with the strange and unsettling world of the computer, teachers can get a useful perspective on what it is like to be a student again. After taking part in an elementary course in programming, Lois Brown, 54, a Wausau grade-school teacher, is thoroughly chastened. "Now I realize how little kids feel when there's a concept they don't understand. I sat in that course not wanting anyone to know all the things I didn't understand."
Despite their obvious wariness of computers, parents are taking the lead in getting them into the schools. In Florida, communities have staged cake and candy sales, carnivals and tree plantings, weekend car washes, even a bike-a-thon to raise funds to buy computers. Says Marilyn Neff of Miami: "We feel computers will be the new paper and pencil." Of the 250 computers in the schools of Utica, Mich., more than two-thirds have been purchased by parent-sponsored fund drives. Says Utica Principal Paul Yelinsky: "Moms and dads are coming in and telling the counselors they have to get their kids in computer classes because it's the wave of the future." So important is computer literacy that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is beginning a major program to get even such traditional liberal arts schools as St. John's College in Maryland to begin giving courses in it.
Though many schools began purchasing computers with federal aid, budget cutbacks are drying up that well. Apple's Jobs points out that other nations, especially Britain, France and the Soviet Union--though surprisingly not the electronics-minded Japanese--are paying far more attention to computer education than is the U.S. Earlier this year, Jobs persuaded California Congressman Pete Stark and Missouri Senator John Danforth to introduce bills in Congress that would allow computer manufacturers to take a hefty tax write-off for any machines they donate to elementary and high schools. Under the present law, full deductions for such scientific equipment are allowed only if it is given to colleges and universities.
Jobs originally spoke of giving an Apple to every public elementary and secondary school in the country, more than 80,000 computers worth as much as $200 million retail. Now he thinks private schools should be included and is encouraging other manufacturers to join in the program as well. Meanwhile, Apple's archrival, the Tandy Corp., maker of the Radio Shack computer line, is taking a different tack: it has pledged $500,000 in equipment to spur development of educational programming, or courseware, for the classroom.
Many of the approximately 100,000 computers now in U.S. schools--roughly one for every 400 students--are in affluent suburbs like Ridgewood, a national leader in computer education. But the machines are also found in the unlikeliest of places. On a Chippewa Indian reservation in Wisconsin, computers are being used by young members of the tribe to learn their ancient and nearly forgotten language. Alaska's small rural schools have been ordering computers to meet a special need: they allow students of different ages and abilities in the same small classrooms to learn at their own pace. Dubuque, Iowa, where The New Yorker Founding Editor Harold Ross disdainfully located his provincial old lady, has 13 machines and another 20 on order. Bill Holloway, a professor of computer education at the University of Kansas, calls the spread of small computers in the classroom nothing less than an avalanche. According to various industry studies, there may be from 300,000 to 650,000 computers in the schools by 1985.
So far, the most common, and least interesting, way to use school computers is in direct drill and review. The machine simply quizzes, prods and grades the student, very much like a robot teacher. Hundreds of programs of this type are available for popular computers like the Apple II Plus, Radio Shack's TRS-80 and the Commodore PET. But many of these programs are little more than computerized rehashes of the old classroom flash cards that go back to the days of McGuffey's readers. One notable difference: today when the student answers correctly, the screen will light up with wows, HOORAYs or smiling animals. Wrong answers may produce sad or scowling faces, perhaps accompanied by a falling tear.
Partly because of teachers' fears--of the machines and for their jobs--and partly because of the poor quality of software, the frequently heralded electronic revolution in the classroom has been slow to occur. Now, however, it is being pushed along by steady improvements in teaching programs, thanks to imaginative enterprises like the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. One of its more refreshing drills: a program called Wrong Note, which helps teach sight reading of musical scores. As a simple tune emanates from the computer's loudspeaker, matching notes appear on the screen, but sometimes the quiz intentionally errs and obliges students to find the false note. In order to do so, they can order up a repetition of the tune as often as Bogie and company did in Casablanca. Says Kenneth Brumbaugh, director of the consortium's instructional services: "Imagine asking a teacher to play it again and again!"
Even very young children can profit from such exercises. At the Nordstom Elementary School in Morgan Hill, Calif., a suburb of San Jose, Colin Devenish, 7, is working with a classmate on the arithmetic drill, honing his skills in addition and subtraction. Unlike youngsters doing such drilling in the past, Colin seems to be enjoying himself enormously. Why? "Because," he replies mischievously within earshot of his teacher, "the computer doesn't yell."
Computers, operated only by touching a few buttons, are also remarkably effective devices for educating the handicapped. At the California School for the Deaf in Fremont, Rhonda Revera, 16, has worked with computers for five years, studying every subject from fractions to spelling. Rhonda offers a paean to the machine in sign language: "Computer makes me remember. It is fast, easy and better than writing on paper."
Still another important use of computers is as a remedial tool. At Manhattan's P.S. 118, Lewis Stewart has not only improved his command of the language with his work on computers, but has also prepared practice exercises for classmates with even more serious reading problems. One is a spelling drill with a special incentive built into it: if all the answers are correct, a video game pops onto the screen as a reward. When one youngster worked his way through the drill, even classroom hecklers were impressed. Said one: "Hey, Old Wentworth's getting better."
More entertaining and demanding are think tank-type strategy games like Geography Search, which launches competing teams on a Columbus-like voyage of exploration. They must make their way across the Atlantic, taking into account currents and winds, finding then" longitude and latitude by means of star patterns and the length of a shadow thrown by a stick at high noon (methods that worked for Columbus, after all), and coping with such unforeseen perils as an outbreak of scurvy, an attack by pirates and a tropical storm. Only shrewd planning, wise choices and cooperative action ensure survival. The simulated voyage becomes uncannily real to the participants. Says the game's creator, Thomas Snyder, 31, who heads Computer Learning Connection, Inc., of Cambridge, Mass.: "When they get near the end and the computer finally shows them another ship near by, they act as if they had actually spotted a ship at sea."
Until a few years ago, the few computers available in secondary schools were essentially "dumb" terminals linked by telephone lines to a large, centrally located machine that served a variety of users through an arrangement called time sharing. All the courseware was stored in the big computer's powerful memory, which could be tapped at will by students and teachers. The most successful example of such a system--and the one still used by Wisconsin's Chippewa Indians--is PLATO (for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations). Developed in the 1960s by the University of Illinois and Control Data Corp., PLATO is an exemplary teacher containing more than 8,000 hours of courseware, much of it in a continuous curriculum. Thus if a youngster forgets a point from an earlier lesson, PLATO will search its prodigious memory and patiently recapitulate.
But such time sharing schemes are extremely expensive, since they require open lines to the central computer. They also can become backed up at peak hours, and do not always lend themselves readily to what is the most intellectually demanding use of the computer: learning how to program it. For this, the inexpensive, easy-to-operate personal computer, entirely self-contained and relying on equipment immediately at the student's side, is an ideal instrument--much more "user friendly," as manufacturers like to say, than big machines. Yet even with a handy micro, programming can overwhelm the uninitiated. The programmer and computer must "speak" a common language.
In the early days of the digital computer, this was extremely difficult. The machine reduces all the information it receives, whether it arrives as letters, numbers or graphic symbols, into the simplest possible electronic statements: either a yes or a no, represented by pulses of high or low voltage. To command the machine in its own internal language meant writing out endless strings of ones or zeros, called bits and bytes, symbolizing those yes or no statements. But scientists soon began creating alternate languages for communicating with the machines that vaguely resemble everyday speech.
The most popular of these computer tongues is BASIC (for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). Developed at Dartmouth by Mathematician John Kemeny and his colleague Thomas Kurtz to let even the least mathematically gifted student converse with the university's computers, it is "understood" by virtually all of today's personal computers. To show just how easy the language is, Kemeny offers this extremely simple lesson in programming: tell the computer to find the square roots (i.e., the numbers that when multiplied by themselves, yield the original numbers) of eleven successive values, say 20 through 30.
The entire operation can be accomplished with a program of just four steps: 1FOR N = 20 T0 30
2 PRINT N, SQR(N)
3 NEXT N
4 END
Translated into everyday language, the first line tells the computer to let N stand successively for 20 through 30. The second instructs the machine to print the first value of N (that is, the number 20), compute its square root (SQR) and print out the result. The third tells the computer to go on to each of the succeeding values, all the way through 30. Finally, the program tells the computer to call it a day, its job having been done. Even the smallest machine can do such calculations in a flash, compared with the hours of work they might require of human computers.
To preserve their creativity, the students can readily store their programs on magnetic tape or on a small, 45 r.p.m.-size plastic record called a floppy disc--which is not, as some parents believe, a new form of back injury. Then when the occasion arises for using the program again, the computer operator merely loads the instructions back into the machine and punches in some new values for N. The same broad principles apply to the creation of all software, even complex simulations like Geography Search.
Literal-minded brutes that they are, computers do exactly what they are told. No more and no less. But youngsters of even the most tender age are surprising educators by showing they can master the beasts with startling ease. Computer Software Expert Leona Schauble of the Children's Television Workshop (producers of Sesame Street) recalls getting an eight-year-old boy at Manhattan's Little Red School House started on a simple computer game. The game generated an image of a frog that would leap up and catch a butterfly, provided the right buttons were hit. After a few minutes, she checked back and found the frog jumping in slow motion. When she asked the youngster what happened, he replied, "Well, I wanted to make the frog catch more butterflies. So I got a listing of the variables and slowed him down." In other words, the youngster had broken into the game's program and changed it to suit himself.
To instruct very young children, even Kemeny's BASIC is much too mathematical. Instead, more and more schools are turning to an innovative computer language called LOGO (from the Greek word for reason), developed by Seymour Papert and his colleagues at M.I.T. A mathematician who studied with the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, Papert has become something of a guru of the computer generation, predicting that the machines will revolutionize learning by taking much of the mystery out of mathematics, science and technology. Says he: "The computer can make the most abstract things concrete."
With a deceptively simple set of commands, LOGO enables youngsters who know nothing of geometry or algebra, and barely know how to read, to manipulate a triangular figure, dubbed the Turtle, on a computer screen and trace all manner of shapes with it. At the Lamplighter School in Dallas, teachers using LOGO get youngsters of three or four to write simple computer instructions. In one game, they maneuver "cars" and "garages" on the computer screen in such a way that the cars are parked inside the garages. While playing with LOGO, the youngsters learn simple words, the difference between left and right, and geometric concepts that they would not ordinarily encounter until junior high.
The machines crop up in the lives of youngsters even before they enter school--and sometimes before they learn to walk or talk--in the guise of such siliconized gadgetry as Little Professor and Speak & Spell. With a few presses of the button, these computerized games produce flashing lights, squealing sounds and disembodied voices that inculcate the rudiments of spelling and calculating. A record of sorts may have been set by Corey Schou, a computer scientist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando: he rigged up a home computer so his five-month-old daughter could operate it by pressing buttons in her crib and changing the designs on a nearby screen. Says the proud papa: "Basically, it's an electronic kaleidoscope, another diversion, another learning device."
Whatever it is, it prepares youngsters for all those buttons they will encounter soon enough in and out of school. Parents and teachers may shudder at the thought, but it is only a short hop from skillful operation of a video game to learning fundamentals of programming. Says M.I.T. Sociologist Sherry Turkic, 33, who has been studying the youthful computer culture for five years: "The line between game playing and programming is very thin. Programming takes what is powerful about games--this articulation of knowledge, this learning about strategy--and carries it to a higher level of power."
By the time the youthful programmers reach the eighth or ninth grade, their skills may reach a marketable level. In Chicago, Jonathan Dubman, 14, and Kay Borzsony, 13, have formed a company called Aristotle Software to sell their own computer games and graphics programs. Says Kay: "The nice thing about the computer business is that there is no real bias against children. In the computer magazines, you read articles by twelve-and 13-year-olds." Laura Hyatt, 15, of Ridgewood, helps a stymied local insurance office figure out how to use its software. Says she: "It's better than babysitting." And, at $3.50 an hour, somewhat more profitable.
The prodigy of prodigies may be Eugene Volokh, 14, of Los Angeles. A Russian emigre, he earns $480 each week by doing 24 hours of programming for 20th Century-Fox, while carrying a full load of courses as a junior at UCLA. This year Greg Christensen, 18, of Anaheim, Calif., could make $100,000 in royalties from a video game he developed that was bought by Atari. Other youngsters are waiting at the sidelines in hopes of catching up with these young entrepreneurs. Every Tuesday night, Scott Whitfield, 13, and his brother Shawn, 11, appear at the Menlo Park, Calif., public library to get computer instruction. Says Scott: "We'll probably never get a job if we don't learn how to use a computer."
Not all youngsters take equally to the machines. In a typical computer class, only about one in five students becomes seriously involved. Says Steven Scott, 16, of Wausau's West High: "Either you get the hang of it or you don't." Even so dedicated a computernik as Ridgewood's Nick Newman finds programming interesting but only for a purpose. His own goal is to apply his computer knowledge to a career in science or medicine.
Whatever these youngsters make of their computer experiences, they will surely confront the world differently from their BILL of PIERCE ease. Many parents. The precise, orderly steps of logic required to use and program the machines promise to shape--and sharpen--the thought processes of the computer generation. Indeed, the youngsters playing all those strategy games are doing precisely what corporations do when they plan to launch a new product or what military leaders do when they devise strategies to confront a potential foe.
Whether such abilities will change the world for the better is another matter. Princeton Psychologist George Miller, for one, has doubts that "a few years of thinking like a computer can change patterns of irrational thought that have persisted throughout recorded history." Other social critics ask if clear thinking is enough--if, in fact, there might not be a danger in raising a generation to believe that it has the analytical tools to contemplate any problem. Says M.I.T. Computer Science Professor Joseph Weizenbaum: "There's a whole world of real problems, of human problems, which is essentially being ig nored." It is still impossible, after all, to reduce a human rela tionship to a printout or to solve a moral question by bits and bytes. Some critics predict a future not unlike that portrayed in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, a science fiction novel set in a society so thoroughly computer-dominated that the people cannot do arithmetic. Humanist Critic George Steiner acerbically calls the computer generation the advance guard of a breed of "computer-mutants." Says Steiner: "They will be out of touch with certain springs of human identity and creativity, which belong to the full use of of language rather than mathematical and symbolical codes."
Many others are much more sanguine. University of Chicago Philosopher of Science Stephen Toulmin predicts that computers will "re-intellectualize" the television generation. "TV relieved people of the necessity to do anything," says Toulmin. "Computers depend on what you do yourself." Catholic Theologian David Tracy argues that "using computers sharpens the mind's ability to deal with our world: the world of technology."
The final word may be simpler, and not pronounced by elders who find a devil ish soul in the new machine. More so than adults, the young know the computer for what it is. Says a ten-year-old at Manhattan's Bank Street School: "It's dumb. I have to tell it everything." They also know something important is afoot. Says Shawn Whitfield: "When I grow up it's going to be the Computer Age. It won't affect parents. They're out of the Computer Age. They had their own age."
--By Frederic Golden. Reported by Philip Faflick/New York and J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago
* References to computer commands to send (POKE) or retrieve (PEEK) information to or from a particular location in the machine's memory.
With reporting by Philip Faflick, J. MADELEINE NASH
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