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Seymour Papert has died

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Re: Seymour Papert has died

#11

Post by joaorico »

"The fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be painfully difficult." [0]

Although Papert is most known for Logo, he did not believe learning how to program was specially good in itself.

It is the fact that the computer allows the child to model almost everything (at almost no cost) that allowed that child to develop and fall in love with a topic, the same way he fell in love with gears at a very young age.

In his own words [1]: "It did not occur to me that anyone could possibly take my statement to mean that learning to program would in itself have consequences for how children learn and think. [...] But encouraging programming as an activity meant to be good in itself is far removed, in its nature, from working at identifying ideas that have been disempowered and seeking ways to re-empower them."

[0] Papert - "Mindstorms" in the Foreword: 'The Gears of My Childhood'

[1] Papert - "What’s the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power"

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#13

Post by joaorico »

joaorico wrote: post #11

"The fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be painfully difficult." [0] Although Papert is most known for Logo, he did not believe learning how to program was specially good in itself. It is the fact that the computer allows the child to model almost everything (at almost no cost) that allowed that child to develop and fall…

From the same Foreword:

"A modern-day Montessori might propose, if convinced by my story, to create a gear set for children. Thus every child might have the experience I had. But to hope for this would be to miss the essence of the story. I fell in love with the gears. This is something that cannot be reduced to purely "cognitive" terms. Something very personal happened, and one cannot assume that it would be repeated for other children in exactly the same form.

My thesis could be summarized as: What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate."

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#14

Post by mcphage »

Tomte wrote: post #2

Just yesterday I finished "Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams" by Resnick who builds heavily upon Papert's work. Mindstorms is on my backlog. I have fond recollections about my first contact with Turtles. It didn't shape me or anything like that, but I'd like to take Logo out again and play with it. Is there a recommended modernish Logo (running on Windows), or should I simply go to Processing?

> Just yesterday I finished "Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams"

Oh, that's a great book.

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#15

Post by ontouchstart »

https://www.c-span.org/video/?67583-1/technology-education

Technology In Education The committee examined technological advances in education. OCTOBER 12, 1995

Alan Brown Superintendent Public Schools

Chris Dede Professor George Mason University

Jeffrey Joseph Vice President U.S. Chamber of Commerce->Domestic Policy

Alan Kay Fellow Apple Computer->Learning Concepts

Cheryl Lemke Associate Superintendent Illinois->Board of Education

Edward McCracken President and CEO Silicon Graphics

Deborah McGriff Senior Vice President Edison Project

Robert W. Mendenhall Vice President IBM->K-12 Industry Division

Seymour Papert Professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology->Technology

David Shaw Chief Executive Officer Shaw Investment Company

Pat Wright Vice President TCI Educational Technologies

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#16

Post by chriswarbo »

Tomte wrote: post #2

Just yesterday I finished "Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams" by Resnick who builds heavily upon Papert's work. Mindstorms is on my backlog. I have fond recollections about my first contact with Turtles. It didn't shape me or anything like that, but I'd like to take Logo out again and play with it. Is there a recommended modernish Logo (running on Windows), or should I simply go to Processing?

EToys is quite nice http://www.squeakland.org

It's a Smalltalk environment extended with a drag-and-drop scripting system. All (literally, all) of the graphical objects can be used as turtles (they have a "pen", and methods for "forward", "left"/"right", etc.).

The really nice part is that it's "turtles all the way down": the entire GUI (scripts, text, buttons, etc.) is made out of the same stuff as user-created objects; you can write scripts which tell other scripts how to move around; and write scripts to tell those scripts how to move around; and so on.

It comes with a bunch of pre-built objects, including a musical keyboard, a paint program, etc. and there are projects like "physical etoys" for hooking in physical sensors and actuators, so you can make a physical turtle.

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#17

Post by agumonkey »

Anecdote: Logo was used in French 80s National "Plan Informatique Pour Tous" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_informatique_pour_tous (Computing for all), running on Thomson MO5 terminals distributed in many schools. Kids (6-9yo I believe) would learn to "program" using it. For the younger ones it was mostly about moving that infamous turtle, and that was it. It was still something utterly magical, even though the lightpen bundled with the MO5 was also a big part of it.

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#19

Post by WorldMaker »

Tomte wrote: post #2

Just yesterday I finished "Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams" by Resnick who builds heavily upon Papert's work. Mindstorms is on my backlog. I have fond recollections about my first contact with Turtles. It didn't shape me or anything like that, but I'd like to take Logo out again and play with it. Is there a recommended modernish Logo (running on Windows), or should I simply go to Processing?

Small Basic has a Turtle object: http://smallbasic.com/doc.aspx?o=Turtle

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#20

Post by richard_todd »

For many years, I completely associated Logo with "turtle graphics" -- like it was a toy for kids to learn programming ideas. I only realized a couple years ago that it's a pretty capable language. The best references I found are a 3-volume set that covers using Logo for symbolic computation, making compilers, a diff tool, etc. PDF/HTML at https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html
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