As recommended by Miles Berry, I am offering to present a pair of sequential sessions, based around the Poplog system, available here www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog.html

The first session will describe and demonstrate some of the main features of Poplog, its motivation, the programming languages it provides, installation, and examples of what can be done with it in a teaching setting, both for teaching a range of programming concepts and techniques and for project work, individual or collaborative. Some of the teaching material to be demonstrated is described here www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog.html#teaching

The presentation will include demonstrating what it is like to use the teaching files, and will be very interactive (if the attendees wish to interact). I hope to indicate how building models of human competence is relevant to answering old philosophical questions, as well as advancing science and engineering.

The second session will continue the topics of the first (because there is so much to demonstrate) and then move on to reasons why I think it is important for the languages and tools used for teaching beginners to be powerful (e.g. so that teachers can use them to produce interesting demonstrations and libraries for learners to use, and so that learners can go on learning more and more without having to switch to a new language).

The system has so far mainly been used for teaching in universities and for research and development (e.g. the well known Clementine Data-mining system was first developed in Poplog). The second session would end with a discussion of whether there is  a place for a system like this in schools, and for the teaching of AI (including how to develop natural language understanding systems, problem solving systems, planning systems, simple neural nets, etc.). This could lead to a discussion of how to make that happen, possibly building on the ideas here www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/courses/alevel-ai.html, or even starting with ten year olds, or younger.

Although it is not the main topic of the presentation I shall demonstrate some of the benefits of using a linux system with multiple virtual desktops for presentations, instead of the more common powerpoint (or openoffice) on a single desktop. (My laptop is a Dell-D610 running Fedora 10).