Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Seymour Papert has died

media.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 145 posts

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#121

Post by ideonexus »

One of my favorite Papert quotes from Mindstorms. I think it summarizes the potential of computers to revolutionize learning by empowering children to be autonomous explorers instead of learner-automatons. I hope one day our education systems will recognize this and flip the system, but it's hard to change culture:

IN MOST contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child. In the LOGO environment the relationship is reversed: The child, even at preschool ages, is in control: The child programs the computer. And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves think. The experience can be heady: Thinking about thinking turns the child into an epistemologist, an experience not even shared by most adults.

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#122

Post by lerpa »

DonHopkins wrote: post #103

Seymour 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 It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp…

Although his methods probably contributed a lot to popularization of computing, as a philosopher the mental model theory of knowledge has been demonstrated insufficient a long while ago, although it remained popular in the AI computer science field for much longer, the problems with that theory were known even during the hey-day of Papert's work.

Just take a look at Hubert Dreyfus' work to better understand the issue.

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#123

Post by ontouchstart »

aidenn0 wrote: post #113
ontouchstart wrote: post #41

Earlier 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.

Do you have an approximate timestamp?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12209538

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#124

Post by ontouchstart »

aidenn0 wrote: post #113
ontouchstart wrote: post #41

Earlier 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.

Do you have an approximate timestamp?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12209678

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#125

Post by bchjam »

lerpa wrote: post #122
DonHopkins wrote: post #103

Seymour 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…

Although his methods probably contributed a lot to popularization of computing, as a philosopher the mental model theory of knowledge has been demonstrated insufficient a long while ago, although it remained popular in the AI computer science field for much longer, the problems with that theory were known even during the hey-day of Papert's work. Just take a look at Hubert Dreyfus' work to better understand the issue…

I don't think constructivism and embodied cognition are too far afield, they both have an emphasis on environmental interaction. That sort of intertwingedness goes along with the general thrust of Dreyfus' argument

(+ here's a link to Dreyfus' essay Why Heideggerian AI failed http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf)

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#126

Post by coroxout »

sn9 wrote: post #98
daeken wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a Udacity mini-course with a fun section on Python turtle graphics, too.

https://www.udacity.com/course/viewer#!/c-ud036/l-1004409226... (UD-036 Programming Foundations with Python, lesson 2A)

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#127

Post by jonnycowboy »

jdcarter wrote: post #46
reuven wrote: post #42

I had the honor of meeting Seymour Papert on a few occasions (there's no way that he would have remembered me), and coming away awestruck and inspired each time. I also read his books and papers, and did a PhD with one of his best-known students, and never failed to come away thorough amazed by his vision, his dedication, and his ability to execute on so much of that -- partly through great research, partly through g…

I'll second the recommendation on "Mindstorms." The book is visionary and just as relevant today as when he wrote it. I teach programming and electronics to kids (just an hour a week) and my teaching is heavily influenced by Mindstorms to this day. In addition, my own first exposure to computers with with LOGO on an Apple II. Papert changed my life, and the enduring quality of his work will continue to change lives f…

Do you have any details of what and how you teach the kids? I am interested in setting something similar up in our neighborhood.

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#128

Post by jdcarter »

jonnycowboy wrote: post #127
jdcarter wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll second the recommendation on "Mindstorms." The book is visionary and just as relevant today as when he wrote it. I teach programming and electronics to kids (just an hour a week) and my teaching is heavily influenced by Mindstorms to this day. In addition, my own first exposure to computers with with LOGO on an Apple II. Papert changed my life, and the enduring quality of his work will continue to change lives f…

Do you have any details of what and how you teach the kids? I am interested in setting something similar up in our neighborhood.

I'm sorry, at the moment I don't have teaching materials in any presentable form. I tried Arduino-based projects, making parts of a 2D game in Swift+SpriteKit, fooling with Minecraft redstone, and worked through Google's blockly games.

Arduino seemed to be click the best, because it involves a lot of working with your hands (both breadboard and soldering) and you can "see" your creation working in a way that you just don't get with pure-software teaching. At least for the ages I was working with (8-10 y/o) blinking a LED held more joy than putting a 2D sprite into a window.

I thought about publishing a more formal project curriculum, but there's a ton of Arduino project books already on the market, so it didn't seem worth it. Instead I just pitch a couple ideas to the kids, see what they want to do, then we spend several sessions building that.

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#129

Post by kkylin »

Perceptrons remains one of my favorite books in many ways. Obviously the single-layer networks Minsky & Papert analyze are very primitive relative to today's deep neural networks, and the actual mathematical content may not be of direct use today. But the arguments were beautiful & insightful, and the exposition clear. For anyone interested in a mathematical understanding of computation in (artificial) neural networks, it's still not a bad place to start.

Re: Seymour Papert has died

#130

Post by ef4 »

jkestner wrote: post #77
ef4 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Most schools can't authentically do the things that Papert describes in Mindstorms. It goes against their very structure. I don't blame the commercial vendors -- they are following the public-policy-directed money. I blame the schools for their culture of top-down control and conformity.

And it goes with the grain in Montessori schools. I was introduced to Mindstorms by my mother, a Montessori educator with barely an interest in computers.

It does, and I think Montessori schools are great.

My one complaint is that a lot of Montessori teachers seem to have a blanket distaste for all electronics that lumps the good (Scratch and Logo) in with the bad (passively watching videos all day).

Post reply on HN