I spent much of the Labor Day weekend at ConJose, the World Science Fiction Convention, having been invited as a specimen. I had been invited to be on two panels more or less centered on computer history and was comp'ed for the days in question.
On one of the panels I opined that we needed more boosts for the imaginations of 13-year-olds both in fiction and in reality. I pointed out that early in high school I had stumbled upon the "Heinlein juveniles" - a series of books written by Robert A. Heinlein between 1948 (Rocket Ship Galileo) and ending in 1961 with Starship Troopers. These were books aimed at exactly my segment, in which an adolescent hero enters into a relationship with technology (and usually a father figure) which lead to an adventure and some additional maturity.
The wonderful thing about these books was that they built up your self-esteem and led you to believe that you could actually get your hands on technology and do things - things that mattered - and have adventure in the process. I must admit that I have been attempting to follow this path ever since.
So I wonder, what today fills the place of these novels? How do kids get turned on to the opportunities for romance, adventure and growth offered by technology? Or do they?
Heinlein, who apparently grew his own audience with these novels and became perhaps the highest-earning science fiction writer of all time, coined a phrase that has developed legs: "you can't pay me back - pay it forward". I interpret that to mean help someone who's coming up as you were helped on your way up, in recompense for the help you got.
Accordingly, I have started thinking about what I might be able to create that would provide the kind of support for kids' involvement in technology that I had gotten from various sources. I learned a great deal about electronics and its implementation by poring over a book which consisted of a series of manuals for building radio (and TV!) kits. I had access to a mound of junked radio and TV chassis' and my father helped me haul them away in his car.
The technology of vacuum tubes was, in many ways, more accessible and forgiving (if you didn't mind the 450 volt plate supplies) than today's transistor and IC devices. You could modify a radio into an intercom or phono amplifier, and dream about making a transmitter out of one, but you can't do that with electronic stuff today. It takes too much engineering to change it.
Thus, I began wondering a while ago what kind of kit would work well to introduce kids to digital technology. The principles I came up with are:
- programmable at the most basic level,
- leading logically to hardware or software depending upon the kid's interests,
- capable of creating interesting effects quickly (impress your friends!),
- made of units that interconnect and encourage kids to come together to build larger things than they can alone.
I decided that the starting point should be "microcode" - the lowest level at which programming and hardware come together. This is represented by the "programmable logic device" (PLD), and chose one of the first designs - known generically as the 16R8. It had an 8 bit wide register whose outputs fed back into an array of programmable AND-OR trees. 9 or 10 inputs also fed into the programmable array, which was implemented by fusible-link technology (later by electrically-erasable technology.
16R8s were chips, programmed by special boxes under control of software that ran on computers. The first few generations could not be reprogrammed. They weren't very attractive to 13-year-olds.
I added retro sensibility. Make them not as chips, but as circuit cards built pretty much with the technology of mainframe computers of the '60's and '70's. Make them with a row of red lights along the front that would display the state of the registers. Make them programmable by hand - no special boxes and no computer programs necessary. Provide for slow, pushbutton clocking so you can see them go through their paces.
With one card you could make eight lights do a few interesting tricks, and in the process gain skill and confidence. Bring together four or five and you can assemble some basic digital devices like a decade counter, a tic-tac-toe game, or a pseudorandom number generator. With enough boards (and some memory boards) you could assemble a computer. Not a store-bought computer, but one built entirely by your gang of kids. Using real technology you can touch and understand and see the red lights blink, not just a grey lump of plastic.
In one direction leads the path to electronics, in the other the path to software. Each one will quickly involve the acolyte in using simulation and design software, but the participants will have a visceral understanding of what makes the stuff underneath run.
I know how to design these cards, but that's the less important part. Who reading this thinks they know how to present it to the kids, what "courseware" would work best, and how to assemble the package into something that would make sense economically as well as technologically?
The keyword for this discussion will be KidzPALS (the first PLDs - invented by Jon Birkner - were branded as PALs - for Programmable Array Logic).
8:31:48 PM 
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