Gravity and the Power of Programming


In his book Hackers, Stephen Levy, talks about an early “application” of computers by college kids at MIT: games! One of the most popular games they wrote was called Spacewar, two rocket ships trying to destroy each other. Another kid, Dan Edwards, was “dissatisfied with the unanchored movement of the two dueling ships”. He felt that “adding a gravity factor” would make the game more interesting, ergo he added a sun to the game:
“You could use the sun’s gravitational pull to give you speed as you circled it, but if you weren’t careful and got too close, you’d be drawn into the sun, which was certain death.”

I was reminded of that when I was teaching my 7 yo daughter to program in this language-for-kids called Scratch. I was talking her through this game I found on the Net called Dodge Ball (you try to go from A to B, climb up poles along the way, all the while avoiding getting hit by rolling balls).
The author of the game was in teaching mode, so the game was developed step by step. At one point, he wrote:
“You may have noticed that your character can walk off a platform into mid-air. Try to walk off of a platform and see what happens.”
Ergo, the solution:
“To fix this, let’s add gravity to your game.”

And so we added “gravity” to the game. Though my daughter didn’t understand the exact instructions we wrote, I guess that she did appreciate the value of what was being done because she went and told my wife, “I added gravity (to the game).” If that is true, kiddo, it adds you to the elite Gravity Club: Newton, Einstein and those kids at MIT!

Days later, my daughter wrote the numbers 1 to 300 on a piece of paper and then asked me to do the same. “Ok”, I said, “but I’ll do it on the laptop.” She shot me down saying, “No, no, that’s not the same. You’ll write some instructions for the computer to create the list.” Touché! I am thrilled that she’s understood the power of programming, even if she can’t write (much) software herself…

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