A New Direction for Montessori Computers

Guest post by Brandon Smith

In 2018, I set out to teach my wife and children the basics of computer science, while also sharpening my own skills. I worked with them to discover how they could learn the concepts that are foundational to how I think and operate when I’m working with computers.  Using the lens of Montessori learning that some dear friends of ours taught us, we navigated to physical metaphors for the electrical realities of the inner workings of computers, and in the process I got to watch the light come on for my wife. 

By 2019, we had arrived at a complete module, and were starting to go through all the legal process of patents and starting a business to market and sell what we had developed. 

By the spring of 2020, we were ready to launch, and the world found itself incredibly distracted with something else. I ended up changing jobs, and we wrote off the exercise.

Now, five years later, with the advent of AI becoming more powerful and more mainstream, the fundamentals that I taught my family have not changed. What has changed is that what appears to be expedient to learn has drifted quite a ways from how the underlying computation functions. That being the case, the only way to maintain mastery over these tools designed to serve us is to do what they can’t do- understand them from the inside out. To that end, we are adjusting our mode of distribution to make Montessori computers as accessible as possible. We hope you find a balance of DIY and off the shelf that will make it easy for you to try something new. We think you will enjoy it!