I came to the SF Bay Area to attend Cal (Berkeley) in 1967.My older brother, Bob, was one of a small group of high school students at George Washington H.S. in Denver, who was enrolled in Irwin Hoffaman's math classes in 1961-64. Those were the generative days when Bob Albrecht started teaching computer programming to these students, and to my knowledge, it was the first such high school in the U.S. where computer programming became a part of a math learning community. Ironic, really, since unfortunately, all too few middle and high school math teachers in the U.S. now view computers and computer applications as central to their teaching practice--and yet a major part of the computer education revoluton was born from these math classes: I only wish people like Lud Braun, Tom Dwyer, Kemeny and Kurz and others were teaching in our own kids' schools today!). So I was around for the birth of PCC, as my brother Bob, and the late LeRoy Finkel (of blessed memory) were part of DYMAX, which was affiliated with PCC. I then co-founded the Math and Computer Education Project at the Lawrence Hall of Science in 1971 just as I was getting a BA in computer science (in those days, there were only 2-3 universities in the U.S. which has a computer science major as a liberal arts degree)--and this began my career in educational and learning technologies. These adventures later included a 2-year stay in Israel, doctoral work with Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg's Learning Research/Smalltalk group at Xerox PARC, Atari (and founding.directing the Atari Institute), Picodyne Corporation, Digital F/X, the late Institute for Research on Learning (IRL), and most recently our own company, DesignWorlds for Learning, Inc. My wife of nearly 20 years, Frona--and also our DesignWorlds partner--was a co-founder of The Learning Company 20 years ago--and we now have two sons who have inherited our legacy and lifelong interest in learning, music, computer games, media/animation, and math. You can find out much more about what we've been doing, which has been around using technology and the Net to help create new kinds of virtual and real lifelong learning communities, at http://www.designworlds.com.
Ted Kahn |
