Professor Hal Abelson has been active in computer science for over half a century—the first computer he worked with, in high school, was the kind where programs were encoded in a pattern of holes punched into a paper tape fed into the machine. When he arrived at MIT as a graduate student in the late 1960s, Abelson became involved in exploring computers’ potential as educational tools. One of his first projects, under the guidance of Prof. Seymour Papert, involved working to create a graphics display for use with the Logo programming language, which had first been introduced to schoolkids just a year or two earlier. In this episode, Prof. Abelson reminisces about those early experiences and discusses the importance of computer education for everyone–including, and especially, for children who have the power to make real-world impact through their programming work. He also weighs in on the risks associated with artificial intelligence, and describes his involvement in MIT’s decision to give away educational materials online for free—an initiative that ultimately became MIT OpenCourseWare. Fundamentally, Prof. Abelson believes that computer scientists need to confront not only the technical challenges of designing new systems or applications, but also a deeper, humanistic question: “What, in fact, is worth making?”

Relevant Resources:

MIT OpenCourseWare

The OCW Educator Portal

Prof. Abelson’s faculty page

Logo and the Turtle

Scratch coding language

MIT App Inventor

6.S062 Generative Artificial Intelligence in K-12 Education on MIT OpenCourseWare

Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer 

Brett Paci, producer  

Dave Lishansky, producer 

Jackson Maher, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman