Alan Kay: Dynabook & OOP

💻📖💡👨‍🏫 Learn about the computer scientist, key figure in OOP & GUIs, who envisioned the Dynabook.

Alan Kay is a computing pioneer whose ideas shaped personal computing and learning. He conceived the Dynabook (the vision behind laptops and tablets as personal media for learning), led the team that built Smalltalk and much of the modern graphical user interface at Xerox PARC, and articulated object-oriented programming as message-passing between independent objects. Turing Award, 2003.

He is a fierce advocate for computing as a medium for children to think with (Squeak, Etoys, Viewpoints Research), and a noted critic of "black box" software that hides its workings from learners.

His work carries Seymour Papert's and Jean Piaget's ideas about learning-by-building into the medium of the personal computer itself.