February 13, 2012

“Thus in its embodiment as the physical computer, computation opens a vast universe of things to do. But the real magic comes when this is combined with the conceptual power of theoretical ideas associated with computation.” Papert S. (1980). Teaching Children Thinking in Taylor, R., Ed., The Computer in School: Tutor, Tool, Tutee. New York: [...]

November 28, 2011

“I end by mentioning two less specific “firsts” with which “Teaching Children Thinking” should be credited. At that time the concept of computers in education was synonymous with CAI (computer assisted instruction). I believe that “Teaching Children Thinking” was the first published paper to suggest that the child could be in charge of the machine [...]

November 21, 2011

“Some of my colleagues are disappointed that School manages to so dilute the ideas or so circumscribe their impact that they can be “integrated” into an essentially unchanged system. I have learned to see things differently through my Piaget-trained eyes. At the core of Piaget’s theory of development is the process he calls assimilation: when [...]

November 14, 2011

“Although printed in 1970, “Teaching Children Thinking” was conceived in 1968 and bears the signs of the heady atmosphere of that time. Across the society change was in the air, deeply rooted assumptions were being challenged. On a smaller and less active but not less radical scale challenges to taken-for-granted ideas about children, about education [...]

October 25, 2011

“Let’s go back to Dewey for a moment. Intellectual growth, he often told us, must be rooted in the child’s experience. But surely one of the fundamental problems of the school is how to extend or use the child’s experience. It must be understood that “experience” does not mean mere busy work: two children who [...]

April 25, 2011

Today’s feature is a very special addition to The Daily Papert. It is not by Seymour Papert, but is about some of his most important work, the invention of the Logo programming language for children. In 1967-68, few others imagined putting computational power in the hands of children. Two of those visionaries are honored here. [...]

March 10, 2011

“Many children who have trouble understanding mathematics also have a hopelessly deficient model of what mathematical understanding is like. Particularly bad are models which expect understanding to come in a flash, all at once, ready made. This binary model is expressed by the fact that the child will admit the existence of only two states [...]

January 31, 2011

“The phrase, “technology and education” usually means inventing new gadgets to teach the same old stuff in a thinly disguised version of the same old way. Moreover, if the gadgets are computers, the same old teaching becomes incredibly more expensive and biased towards its dumbest parts, namely the kind of rote learning in which measurable [...]