New York Times coverage, "Seymour Papert, 88, Dies; Saw Education’s Future in Computers": http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/technology/seymour-pape...
Truly a legend, will be sorely missed
Seymour Papert has died
131–140 of 145 posts
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#132Seymour Papert was a great philosopher, whose work on Constructionism has uplifted many children, inspired the OLPC project, and continues to have a huge positive influence on the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo... Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from the MIT-AI ITS system. It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp…
IIRC, I wrote "On the Utilities Disk is an Adventure program written by a typical 14-year-old using Logo." We all had a good chuckle over that. You used overlays with LOAD to navigate across roomsets.
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#133In 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…
Did you know there was a 6502 assembler shipped as part of Terrapin Logo (and the other MIT licensees)? It'd be great to hear from anybody who learned assembler because of it.
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#134In 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…
You youths! I had a similar introduction to Logo, on an Apple ][ at a computer day camp in the summer of 198x. We programmers tend to love learning the shiny new languages, but it's thanks to the enduring idea behind this language that many of us acquired the love. I strive to build something as lasting. Papert on the turtle, children and the physical version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTd3N5Oj2jk
Like you, I learned Logo on an Apple ][ in the '80s. Apart from some dabbling in between, I wouldn't pick up programming in a serious way until grad school. Despite the long gap, that early start made a huge difference for me, and I'll never forget the simple pleasures that Logo afforded me as a child.
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#135Earlier 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?
You can read my thesis: http://klotz.me/thesis.pdf
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#136https://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.
At least, I think we have hit the point where a 5 year life cycle for a $1000 computer is reasonable.
On the other hand there's still a lot of teaching where a single person sits in front and tries to broadcast knowledge to a group of students, which to me seems absurd. The fact that the most obvious difference between schools now and 30 years ago is that whiteboards, powerpoint, and flatscreens have replaced blackboards, overhead projectors, and film projectors was perhaps predictable, but seems wasteful.
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
At least, I think we have hit the point where a 5 year life cycle for a $1000 computer is reasonable. On the other hand there's still a lot of teaching where a single person sits in front and tries to broadcast knowledge to a group of students, which to me seems absurd. The fact that the most obvious difference between schools now and 30 years ago is that whiteboards, powerpoint, and flatscreens have replaced blackbo…
Thanks for the observation on the 5 year life cycle.
But if we think of the "education" in 5-year stages: the first is elementary school, the second is middle and high school, the third is college, the fouth is grad school.
So the the "life-long" educational computer budget for each student is $4000.
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#138In 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…
Did you know there was a 6502 assembler shipped as part of Terrapin Logo (and the other MIT licensees)? It'd be great to hear from anybody who learned assembler because of it.
I didn't know that. I wasn't even running it on a 6502 system. It was running on a mac, so either PPC or Intel.
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#139Seymour Papert was a great philosopher, whose work on Constructionism has uplifted many children, inspired the OLPC project, and continues to have a huge positive influence on the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo... Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from the MIT-AI ITS system. It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp…
>Here is a Logo Adventure game I wrote for Terrapin, the first program I ever sold, which they distributed with C64 Terrapin Logo, because they wanted a simple non-graphical game that showed off Logo's list processing capabilities
Neat. Think it'll run on UCB? Those Terrapin licenses are expensive.
I think I might need some of your nitrous oxide for the LLogo sources, though. I am not fluent in maclisp. :-)
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#140Seymour Papert was a great philosopher, whose work on Constructionism has uplifted many children, inspired the OLPC project, and continues to have a huge positive influence on the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo... Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from the MIT-AI ITS system. It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp…
IIRC, I wrote "On the Utilities Disk is an Adventure program written by a typical 14-year-old using Logo." We all had a good chuckle over that. You used overlays with LOAD to navigate across roomsets.
Yes. Knowing the typical 14-year old, if you'd actually have written that program as described, you'd end up in a hell of cascading ifs.