I saw an interesting news report on Swedish TV tonight. Kids in the first grade learn to read by pairing up and writing stories for each other using a computer. It seems that writing is easier to learn than reading. Handwriting, however, is too hard for children to start with, and by using a computer they don’t need to focus on the complicated act of forming letters. That can come later.

I see similarities between this and the agile approaches to software development:

• The creative ordering of what to learn first can be compared to how user stories can be switched around as they are considered independent of each other.
• Starting with the simplest thing first. At first one thinks that one has to be able to read before one can write, but as writing according to this theory is simpler for the children; move that first. This can be compared to the idea about “doing the simplest thing that can possibly work” in XP. In some of the more traditional approaches you almost automatically design bottom up, e.g. starting to design database schemas and protocols because that stuff “just has to be in place first.”
• The children wrote in pairs, seated at one computer, one child writing a story to the other. That’s pair programming for you.
• The children had a lot more fun producing stories, complete with illustrations, than they would have had if they had used the more traditional approach.

A writeup of the news report (in swedish) can be found here.
After some googling, I found out that the method was developed by Arne Trageton.