If you are an ACM member, you can download Papert's classic Mindstorm book here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1095592&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFI...
(yes, the lego robot gets its name from this book)
Seymour Papert has died
91–100 of 145 posts
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I'm a bit bummed about the general commercialization of some elements of Scratch, I think it's fair to say that there is an encouraging amount of work being done in parallel with Scratch that keeps us from living in a monoculture of blocks. As examples, the blockly [0] library makes it easier for devs to build blocks-based programming interfaces for a lot of systems. It's been used in App Inventor for building…
I have seen Boxer referenced and it seems like a great idea. Did it lead to something else and if not is there a good reason. I'd like to know more about it but the name makes it hard to search for. Is there a way to run it?
Boxer was the nicest Logo I used. I don't know where you would get it today and you would probably need an emulation of a classic Macintosh to run it. People wanting to extend Scratch should take a look at Boxer because the real problem with Scratch is that it is "flat" while any non trivial system is nested.
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#93Seymour Papert and Paulo Freire Debate Technology and the Future of Schools https://youtu.be/4V-0KfBdWao
Wow, two of my heroes together! Sure it will be better than Batman Vs Superman...
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#94Just 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?
Try UCBLogo ( https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html ) or NetLogo ( https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ ).
I was told in another thread [0] that NetLogo isn't really suitable for "turtle graphics" and is apparently for "actor based modelling". I certainly found the interface overwhelming.
When I last used Logo it was in mswLogo [1].
There's also Lhogho [2], Python's turtle module [3] and FMSLogo [4]
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149061
1: http://www.softronix.com/logo.html (not sure if this is the original site)
2: http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I'm a bit bummed about the general commercialization of some elements of Scratch, I think it's fair to say that there is an encouraging amount of work being done in parallel with Scratch that keeps us from living in a monoculture of blocks. As examples, the blockly [0] library makes it easier for devs to build blocks-based programming interfaces for a lot of systems. It's been used in App Inventor for building…
I have seen Boxer referenced and it seems like a great idea. Did it lead to something else and if not is there a good reason. I'd like to know more about it but the name makes it hard to search for. Is there a way to run it?
Yeah, it's too bad it never really took off. I may be misrepresenting Boxer here (as I was never part of the project, but was a grad student and later lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Education), but my impression was that it was sort of a victim of its avant-garde ideas at the time.
Boxer was a pretty revolutionary programming environment when it was introduced (see [0] for an example paper from 1986). Great computing ideas (object oriented, dynamically scoped variables, visual programming environment), and an amazing space for pedagogical application.
Imagine that instead of a paper notebook, you could write your ideas in a computational medium that could pretty easily create and run dynamic representations. That's something people keep inventing and re-inventing, and Boxer was one of those really early models.
One core problem (again, all of this is IMO) was that the driving force behind Boxer (Andrea diSessa) utilized it in smaller-scale research. That's not to say diSessa's research wasn't really important - it really was. There's a ton of super-important learning sciences contributions to what we know about how people learn, the nature of concepts and misconceptions (calling into question the very nature of misconceptions as a useful category), and how people's ideas change over time. But that's kind of the problem - diSessa used Boxer as a way to create really interesting environments for his research on learning and knowing. It was never given the heavy-duty push that logo and later stuff from the MIT media lab had. For example, Mitch Resnick and Yasmin Kafai co-edited "Constructionism in Practice", which was a pretty good book that showcased a ton of the applications of logo to teaching (and their work tended toward whole-school interventions).
All that said, as of a few years ago, I believe there was both a windows and mac version of boxer and it was still under development. I'm not sure if that's still true- diSessa has retired, and his website seems unreachable now.
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#96In 200x, when I was in 4th grade, my teacher said that that day, we would be learning some programming. We were strictly a Mac school, and Scratch wasn't as well known at the time, so the language and environment we learned was Terrapin Logo. There's nothing like looking at the screen and seeing something that you made come to life for the first time. And there's nothing quite like being given a problem that seems im…
Likewise, my introduction to computer programming came in the form of StarLogo (a now wildly changed Logo derivative) in the 6th grade while the 2004 election was winding up. Despite the many years it's been since I've used Logo, this news has hit really hit me with sadness for the loss of a personal icon combined with a rush of nostalgic memories of creating graphics and silly games with Logo, along with the fundamentals and features of a programming environment, presented in a way that would keep me thinking about computer programming for the next 12 years (and I'm sure the next 20).
Many today trot out the Poignant Guide, "Learn You A ..." and related efforts as the future of computer education for young people.
I say give them Logo: I was taught by a schoolmarm with no particular programming background in a public school with 20 other kids. I myself didn't have a computer at home but Logo showed me what I was missing by inserting itself into the curriculum of the "new digital economy": driving kids who would have never used a computer to be programmers. The examples and challenges were fun, deep and made writing toy programs a joy.
To this day, Logo seems to crops where I least expect it: A clever t-refplace joke in the pioneering zine "Mondo 2000" (as well as ads for Terrapin), a Larry Wall interview and even my recent toy implementation of the inconvergent tree: http://zv.github.io/algorithmic-tree.html use knowledge I first learned on Logo.
Today, Seymour and Logo are titans, if only to me.
`crtdo` a new turtle in his memory.
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#97Just 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?
In addition to what others have mentioned, Racket also comes with a turtle-like graphics module:
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#98Python has a "logo inspired" turtle in the standard lib: https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/turtle.html We played with it with my son and it brought back memories from the 80s when the French government made a big push on Logo in the schools.
Oh man, you absolutely made my day. I've been teaching my fiancee bits of Python for the past couple days (her first code ever!) and this library made it all make sense. It let her take all the little concepts I taught her, and put them together to make something cool. She just wrote a street with houses on it, generated by a simple for loop!
The freely available online book Think Python is a fantastic introduction to both CS and Python and includes a chapter on turtle graphics with some fun exercises.
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#99Learning Logo on a Microbee in 1987 was my first introduction to computers. I remember being immensely excited when I figured out how to draw a circle.
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#100wow amazing
http://greenlahore.blogspot.com/