Indeed each of the mental models I discuss in this blog are of human designed artefacts, often made for other purposes than education. My purpose in discussing this is to raise consciousness, since for most of us, powerlessness to develop our own programming language, notional machine, microworld nor IDE, leaves us with the view that these are somehow important, given, and all we can ever expect. You can see this in the debates about the ‘professional’ languages that learners must acquire. I’d like to see an improved and empowered design discourse around such matters in order that we can in turn improve the educational experiences we offer. After all, many of the programming languages now used by professionals started life as educational programming languages.