In Alan Kay's original paper "A personal computer for children of all ages" in 1972, he described an experiment by Omar Khayyam Moore; the talking typewriter: it was a device that spoke the words typed on it, but remained silent for whatever entered that isn't a word.
The experiment was to leave the typewriter in a play area populated by toddlers (about the age of 3) and eventually the devices taught them - more precisely enabled them to teach themselves - reading and writing. My question is: why isn't everyone doing this now? You'd expect those results would influence schools, nurseries, and parents. You'd expect tons of such electronic devices to be for sale since decades ago. If there's something that would sell to parents, it would be 'instant reading teacher'. So why didn't this just *spread*? I have 3 guesses: 1- The experiment was discredited for some reason or disproven by another later experiment. 2- It was scientifically sound, but no one simply cared. That's perfectly possible since social and cultural aspects have much more influence than expected. 3- No one of the scientific community cared, so no further work was done to prove or disprove it. It remains a hypothesis. I've tried to search online for papers or articles about the experiment, but most of what I found was news about it from the 60s...I thought I'd ask here :)
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