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&nbsp;Lahore : 18 Oct:Learning to Learn, a live video conferencing seminar by Walter Bender
&ldquo;Computer programming should be accessible to everyone&rdquo;. This was stated by Walter Bender, former president of One Laptop-Per-Child project, and founder of Sugar Labs, at a live video conferencing seminar arranged yesterday by STEP, Science, Technology and Education in Pakistan. Walter, who is the former executive director of the world famous MIT Media Lab, was speaking simultaneously to several universities across Pakistan, including LUMS, FAST-NU Islamabad, NUST SEECS, IBA Karachi and IBA Sukkur. &ldquo;It turns out that computation is a very nice, safe place to try risk-taking and problem solving... so we really want to introduce computation to kids as soon as we can to get them to think about thinking&rdquo;, said Walter.
The One-Laptop-Per-Child foundation was launched in 2005 by MIT faculty members, including Walter Bender, but the history of the project goes more than 40 years back. &ldquo;As far back as 1960s, some of my colleagues figured out that computers were wonderful things for children to work with and to think with.&rdquo; One of the first experiments of these ideas was actually carried out in Pakistan. &ldquo;By the early 1980s, we were already doing one-to-one computing with children in schools in Pakistan, Senegal and Columbia&rdquo; said Walter.
Walter, who now heads the Sugar Foundation, which makes software for kids to explore learning with, urged Pakistani faculty and students to help in the development of Sugar platform. He suggested making content in Urdu, as well as games and activities in the local context as some of the projects that engineering and computer science students can undertake. &ldquo;I thoroughly enjoyed the talk.&rdquo; said Asadullah Naweed, a Computer Science major at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. &ldquo;There are several projects around this that we can do in summers, and it would be beneficial for communities in Pakistan.&rdquo;
&ldquo;The purpose of these talks is to connect top researchers and entrepreneurs to the Pakistani universities. We are using video conferencing back-bone provided by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) to simultaneously connect Pakistani universities to all over the world&rdquo;, said Salman Baset, one of the editors of STEP and the host of the talk. &ldquo;The technology has really matured to an extent that with me sitting in New York, the speaker in Boston, and universities in four or five different cities in Pakistan can interact together via the internet!&rdquo;
STEP talks is a monthly seminar series, organized by the science and education blog STEP (http://nextstepforward.net), that connect leading scientists and thinkers around the world to university campuses in Pakistan. University participants include LUMS, NUST, Air University, FAST, AKU-IED, IBA, and Virtual University. Earlier speakers have included Prof. Jeannette Wing (CMU), Dr. Soresh Surana (UC-Berkely), Aristeidis Karalis (MIT), Adrien Treuille (CMU), and Derek Chiou (UT Austin).