BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.

The reason most kids don't like school is not that the work is too hard, but that it is utterly boring.

There's a tendency to make jazzy educational software that's very uniform and therefore just like school. I'd like to see a company develop software for rebellious kids who don't want to go to school.

A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.

It's not what you know about the computer that's important, but your ability to do things with it. By studying French in an academic setting, you get to know a lot about it, but typically, you can't express yourself well or have an interesting conversation with it.

I tell adults about the experiences of more than a hundred teachers I've interviewed. They tell me that allowing the child to help them learn helped them become better teachers. That's because they no longer had to pretend they were the experts - not only about computers but about other things.

What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate