were relational; three out of the four boys environmental. Motherwell's research supports our observation that children who anthropomorphize the computer are no less technically sophisticated than those who do not. The degree of anthropomorphization does not reflect expertise but psychological approach. Motherwell's research also supports our association of programming style and gender. Looking at Motherwell's data through our theoretical prism, it is as though, once they have placed the computer in the not-alive category, the boys tend to settle with relief into treating it as a thing. This helps them to appropriate it through a relationship that involves distance, objectivity, and control. And it is as though the girls, once having settled the question of biological aliveness, get more comfortable with the machine by making it an interactive partner. In the computer they have found something in the domain of formal systems to which they can relate with informality. The conventional route into formal systems, through the manipulation of abstract symbols, closes doors that the computer can open. The computer, with its graphics, its sounds, its text and animation, can provide a port of entry for people whose chief ways of relating to the world are through movement, intuition, visual impression, the power of words and associations. And it can provide a privileged point of entry for people whose mode of approach is through a close, bodily identification with the world of ideas or those who appropriate through anthropomorphization. The computational object, on the border between the idea and a