Barbie is the key to everything

by philg

The Saudis have figured out that Barbie is a major cultural force (story).  An American woman a couple weeks ago was equally clued in.  We were talking about the best environments for teaching children to program computers (perhaps a questionable project these days, rather akin to teaching children other Third World skills that are irrelevant in a developed nation, e.g., soaking manioc).  She was an expert in the area and it seems that no progress has been made since Logo (1970s) and that, in any case, hardly any kids were learning anything substantial about programming.  Such kids who were doing anything with computers were mostly boys.  She observed “I hate to say this but what we really need to get girls excited about computers is a Barbie programming language.”

10 thoughts on “Barbie is the key to everything”

  2. The REBOL language embodies principles of LOGO, and it’s built for modern practicality. REBOL is designed to enable creation of user friendly sub-languages. A Barbie dialect might take an afternoon to code, once you distilled the “essence” of Barbie semantics from legions of young girls.

  3. REBOL’s syntax is so amazing! Too bad it’s not open source, or it would’ve taken the world by storm a few years ago. 🙁

    Also to note: It’s creator is Carl Sassenrath, of Amiga fame. Now *that’s* something that should interest you. 🙂

  5. I’m surprised that Mattel has never marketed an “Arabic” Barbie for the Arab countries of the Middle East. They could name the doll “Saree” and manufactured it with dark hair, brown eyes, and a slightly darker skin color. And most important, Mattel could outfit the doll in the traditional Arabic attire. They could also market a matching Ken doll, named Omar, not as the boyfriend of Saree, but as her older and wise brother who escorts Saree whenever she needs to venture out in public. 😉

  6. Philip,

    I don’t get it. I am puzzled by your parenthetical comment that “teaching children to program computers [is] a questionable project these days, rather akin to teaching children other Third World skills irrelevant…” Sure, we’ve outsourced lots of tedious programming jobs to various Third World countries. And yeah, not even a second-rate intellect would want to grind out code for an entire career. But what’s irrelevant about teaching kids the stepping stone to computer science?

    Is teaching children serious math and science irrelevant? From what I have seen in some K-12 schools, many professional educators believe it is.

    My own experience is that it’s hard to teach kids programming because there are few decent texts, materials, or resources to work with. You’re pretty much on your own; you need to develop a lot of materials yourself and it’s not easy. The only modern Logo-like environment I know of that’s kid-friendly comes from Lego (Mindstorms: Robotics Invention System), and I think it would appeal more to boys than girls. As I see it, nobody has taken Logo far enough.

    My 11 year old daughter never was interested in Barbie, so that wouldn’t work for her. The toyware that did work came from the fertile mind of Bill Gates, i.e. Visual Basic. She started programming Logo at age 7, but within a year or so, she outgrew it. Billy’s toyware fits the bill (so to speak) because you can build real software in VB and there are plenty of learning materials around. For my daughter, this meant she could easily build games, which is what many kids are interested in.

    So, for toyware, forget Mattel and look to Microsoft. Naturally I would have preferred that my daughter graduate from Logo to Scheme(or even Java), but that simply wasn’t in the cards. Apparently only Gates and company really understand the “crack house” model of software marketing, specifically, the first hit is free.

    If Bill Gates is the only one left who’s ready, willing, and able to hook kids in to the entry level of computer science, then what’s the world coming to?

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