What might a more physical & tactile computing experience look like for kids?

Physical computation can make abstract concepts much more obvious & intuitive. The Montessori abacus is one of the classic examples. Since young kids are such physical learners, isolating a concept (like addition) with a material & then letting them play with it makes the concept feel almost inevitable.

I’ve always felt that teaching calculus formally is kind of a horrendous way to introduce it. Most people already understand things like “the rate water fills up a tank” but the formalism can quickly obscure any physical intuition. I learned about gear-based integrators recently, and the whole class of mechanical analog computers seems like an obvious Montessori-style way to build physical intuitions for calculus. Students could change one aspect of the machine and directly see the effect on the computation it’s doing.

Some examples at the end of this discussion with ChatGPT

Misc other notes:

• AR glasses and playing w LEGOs or whatever
• Rapid 3D printing and iteration
• How can you compute using physical materials? What does that mean? Turing Castle like in Diamond Age?
• Minecraft level ability to compute in real life? How???