When I first learned to program in Microsoft’s QBASIC language, one of the first things I did was add a cheat code to the Nibbles game that would let my snake could pass through walls.
Sophie, at age three, prefers the Mickey Mouse game to Nibbles, but her instincts are the same. One of her games asks her to find all the shapes in a cartoon scene. First, find all the squares! Windows, sidewalk squares, fences, and even a suspiciously square tree are all valid choices. Each one she clicks gets a colorful outline and some praise from Minnie Mouse.
She’s learned, however, that pressing the “I” key offers a “Hint” by outlining one of the shapes not yet found. So how does she play now? The moment she’s asked to find squares, she just holds “I” until they’re all highlighted and the game is over!
What I want to know most is: how did she figure that out in the first place?
The real mystery is why “I” is for “hint”. Perhaps it’s really “I” for “interrogate” or “illuminate”, which would also explain why Sophie knew she should press “I”.
When I learned to program using Dartmouth BASIC on a timesharing teletype terminal in the home economics classroom at Jamesville-Dewitt High School, the first thing I did was write a graphical user interface which I called “Sheets of glass set in a wall”. I got a D- for my effort.
Later my school got a programmable calculator the size of microwave oven. It had about twenty keys (digits, operations, some registers). I wrote a program to calculate the mean and standard deviation of some stock market data. I also got it to play music digitally using a program I called HintTunes. I got an A+ for the stock stuff in my (non-home) economics class.
When I was in high school, educators wanted to know if teenagers could understand and use computers. That question has been answered: only teenagers understand and can use computers. Also cell phones. And self-checkout.