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Seymour Papert has died

media.mit.edu

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Re: Seymour Papert has died

#111

Post by thewarrior »

Zafira wrote: post #110
throwaway2998 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Greetings from India . Could you elaborate on his thoughts on that ? I too sometimes feel like I've missed out on a good education. But I feel it's too late now to change that. :(

It is likely referring to the criticisms that IIT creates a socioeconomic pecking order with IIT as the crème de la crème and all the prestige associated with it. I'm not sure, but how much value is seen being an IIT graduate? How much of an edge would it give you in your career?

The advantage is huge.

I'd find it hard to quantify, but an IIT graduate can expect to earn atleast 4-5 times more than the average graduate over their life time.

And owing to the huge population , most people are simply locked out of a lot of the best jobs and positions which such an elite degree can open up.

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#112

Post by thomasfoster96 »

josegonzalez wrote: post #108
gizmodo59 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about this. Stanford/Harvard is much more than the curriculum.

Based on what you are responding to, it sounds like you are saying those not at said schools should not learn what is in the curriculum.

I don't think the comment meant that, rather that a lot of the success of those institutions in educating people comes from having better facilities, better teachers, better community, etc.

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#113

Post by aidenn0 »

ontouchstart wrote: post #41
ontouchstart wrote: post #15

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->Boar…

This is a long 1995 congress hearing video that I doubt many people have time and patience to sit through. But if you fast forward to the debate between D.E. Shaw and Seymour Papert/Alan Kay, you will find out 20 years later, the hardware progress is almost exactly as Shaw had predicted, on the other hand, we are far from the vision of Seymour Papert and Alan Kay.

Do you have an approximate timestamp?

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#115

Post by sleepychu »

thomasfoster96 wrote: post #112
josegonzalez wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what you are responding to, it sounds like you are saying those not at said schools should not learn what is in the curriculum.

I don't think the comment meant that, rather that a lot of the success of those institutions in educating people comes from having better facilities, better teachers, better community, etc.

>better facilities, better teachers, better community

This. I had a few good teachers at university that taught me a lot, this made it painfully apparent how little I was learning in some other classes. I guess it's the same everywhere but I suppose you'd expect that the prestige of the IIT would attract the 'better teachers' of course in practice it probably attracts the more prominent experts which isn't the same thing at all ;-)

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#117

Post by tudorw »

What an awesome contribution. I had a good chat with an educationalist about Logo and the hardware device that I experienced in the 70's with a pen that we programmed in primary school, we had a super progressive maths heavy headmaster, hey, maybe that explains something...anyway, a comment was that the more modern turtles made the pen inside the device less obvious and that this small change led to a diminished experience as the children did not get to see first hand the final act of creation, instead it came out of a 'magic box' that did something they maybe did not comprehend, these kind of subtle things show that inter-disciplinary work is super important.

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#118

Post by smallbag »

I just installed Scratch and I find it awful but I am not a teenager. When a child realize that to simulate a small movement or scene you need to feed the computer with a lot of parameters he/she get bored. Fractals, like the Julia image, inspire us with deep thinking. What we want is to learn new concepts in such a way that the ratio power/(number of parameters) is very low. The logo idea is not about a turtle or a moving pen, is about the realization that you can draw complex images with a few parameters. I see loops as a form of parameters in a program. Snake moving is boring, we want to drive a drone. Virtual reality is a way of improving the way in which we feed parameters to the machine, another way is the machine learning about the programmer, completion of sentences, suggestions and predictions are a first step. A new logo is needed but one without turtles.

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#119

Post by eggy »

DonHopkins wrote: post #104
richard_todd wrote: post #20

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

Logo is essentially just Lisp without parenthesis. Everything is possible, and it's all self contained and defined in terms of itself! Leigh Klotz wrote a 6502 assembly language assembler in Logo for Terrapin Logo for the Apple ][ and C64, which you could use to extend Logo do to anything you wanted, like interfacing to hardware.

I've been playing with Lhogho - Logo compiler [1]. The creator has done some amazing things with it and other projects too.

I had an OpenGL spinning pyramid up in 10 minutes and an EXE for windows and an executable for Linux too. Pretty cool, but it is not being developed any longer. It runs fine on my Win 10 box and Linux Ubuntu 14 box.

I found it when looking into Logo because I was working with the modeling software NetLogo [2].

[1] http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/

[2] https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#120

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

buovjaga wrote: post #62
pfooti wrote: post #35

Earlier 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…

Adding one more: https://computinged.wordpress.com/2016/06/13/introducing-gp-... "GP is a new blocks-based programming language being developed by John Maloney (most well-known for developing Scratch), Jens Mönig (developer of Snap!), and Yoshiki Ohshima (one of the developers of Squeak EToys) in Alan Kay’s group. They are all part of the new partnership between Alan Kay and Y-Combinator Research: HARC (Human Advance…

Wow. That looks exciting.
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