Drawing Circles

I remember Logo well. I played with it a lot when I was still very young. So a nice post about corrupting the youth inevitably found me stumbling over to youtube and a talk by Alan Kay.

The gist is that 5 year olds can come up with a "program" to create a circle, whereas 15 year olds cannot. Now there is a trick to it, which is so obvious that you kind of hit your head when you get it, but more than the trick, it shows that very often we follow a train of thought without really first sketching out a few alternatives. Sometimes it is good to stop and really examine what we are trying to achieve and really develop our solution based on that.