The Child as Hacker

The scope of human learning and development poses a radical challenge for cognitive science. We propose that developmental theories can address this challenge by adopting perspectives from computer science. Many of our best models treat learning as analogous to computer programming because symbolic programs provide the most compelling account of sophisticated mental representations. We specifically propose that children’s learning is analogous to a particular style of programming called hacking, making code better along many dimensions through an open-ended set of goals and activities. By contrast to existing theories, which depend primarily on local search and simple metrics, this view highlights the many features of good mental representations and the multiple complementary processes children use to create them. •Programs provide our best general-purpose representations for human knowledge, inference, and planning; human learning is thus increasingly modeled as program induction, learning programs from data.•Many formal models of learning as program induction reduce to a stochastic search for concise descriptions of data. Actual human programmers and learners are significantly more complex, using many processes to optimize complex and frequently changing objectives.•The goals and activities of hacking, making code better along many dimensions through an open-ended and internally motivated set of goals and activities, are helping to inspire better models of human learning and cognitive development.