I made an account today, just to comment on this news. Seymour Papert's work on Constructionism really struck a chord with me. I first learned about his work in college, and things like Logo really resonated with me - to point where I have now changed my career path from an engineer to one that is more education focused. I really hope people everywhere, and at least users on this site will learn more about his work and his importance.
Seymour Papert has died
141–145 of 145 posts
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#142This post might be competing for the "Most time spent on the front page" Award, right?
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The nice thing was that there was no "main program" or parser, it just extended the Logo interpreter top level to be an adventure game!
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The nice thing was that there was no "main program" or parser, it just extended the Logo interpreter top level to be an adventure game!
wait, doesn't that make it trivial to fiddle with the code and cheat? Well, I guess it kinda already was...
Re: Seymour Papert has died
#145My office was next door to Seymour's office at the Media Lab. This was before the motorcycle accident in Vietnam. I was a freshly arrived student from India. His main observation about India was about how the IITs were terrible for the country because they left such a profound debilitating effect on those who did not make it to those schools.
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. :(
Sorry, I missed responding to this.
His point was that there are many many many more students who don't make it to IIT, and feel that not going to IIT has led them to not be confident in their abilities.