Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking

by Shane Snow

John mused, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there were an engineering toy to get girls into programming?” So she built an iPad app called Daisy the Dinosaur, where kids could begin to harness programming’s concepts without having to learn its underpinnings through a series of increasingly difficult puzzles—like Angry Birds and the other touchscreen games kids were used to. Then she created a programming language called Hopscotch for the iPad. It allows kids to generate their own games, apps, and animations using those same puzzle-solving techniques. In the Hopscotch language, with a couple of finger swipes, you can create an “If > Then” statement, a staple of programming logic. This might look like a cartoon squid, with a box underneath it that lets you drag commands like “Turn Right.” With another swipe, you can make the squid repeat everything you dragged into the box, creating a loop, making the squid turn in circles. This is what that MIT mathematician Seymour Papert calls constructionism, or learning by making and manipulating objects. It’s incredibly effective for concept mastery and recall, and it’s almost always aided by platforms. With Hopscotch, kids have re-created their favorite video games, built animated cartoons, and created programs that solve real-world problems. An eighth-grade class made math quizzes for their first-grade mentees, for example. One user made a spin-the-bottle app. Many of these kids don’t even know long division. But John says that’s OK. “You nee...