Kids, programming, and doing more by Greg Linden.
From the post:
I built Code Monster and Code Maven to get more kids interested in programming. Why is programming important?
Computers are a powerful tool. They let you do things that would be hard or impossible without them.
Trying to find a name that might be misspelled in a million names would take weeks to do by hand, but takes mere moments with a computer program. Computers can run calculations and transformations of data in seconds that would be impossible to do yourself in any amount of time. People can only keep about seven things in their mind at once; computers excel at looking at millions of pieces of data and discovering correlations in them.
Being able to fully use a computer requires programming. If you can program, you can do things others can’t. You can do things faster, you can do things that otherwise would be impossible. You are more powerful.
A reminder from Greg that our presentation of programming can make it “difficult” or “attractive.”
The latter requires more effort on our part but as he has demonstrated, it is possible.
Children (allegedly) being more flexible than adults, should be good candidates for attractive interfaces that use topic map principles.
So they become conditioned to options such as searching under different names for the same subjects. Or associations using different names appear as one association.
Topic map flexibility becomes their expectation rather than an exception to the rule.