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  • Paper for the President’s Commission for a National Agenda for the 80s
  • Papert Excerpts from an MIT Media Lab Interactive Videodisc (1986)
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  • Professor Papert Discusses One Laptop Per Child Project
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  • Redefining Childhood: The Computer Presence as an Experiment in Developmental Psychology
  • School’s Out?
  • Semi-annual Constructionism Conference Archives
  • Seymour Papert – Bates College
  • Seymour Papert 2002 Interview
  • Seymour Papert Obituary (1928 – 2016)
  • Seymour Papert Obituary Collection
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 1 – Grammar (1986)
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 2 – Names and Variables (1986)
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  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 2 – Teaching (1986)
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  • Seymour Papert One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Interview
  • Seymour Papert’s Valedictory Speech Upon Being Named LEGO Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab
  • Situating Constructionism
  • Some Poetic and Social Criteria for Education Design
  • SUNDAY INTERVIEW
  • Technology in Schools: Local fix or Global Transformation?
  • Technology Works Enterprises Proposal
  • THE CHALLENGES OF IDC: What have we learned from our past? A conversation with Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, and Alan Kay
  • The Future of School
  • The Future of School
  • The Gears of My Childhood
  • The Learning State
  • The Lessons of Logo
  • The Lessons of Logo
  • The Parent Trap
  • The Wonderful Discovery of Nothing
  • Tomorrow’s Classrooms?
  • Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right but Three Rights Do Make a Left
  • Vision for Education: The Caperton-Papert Platform
  • What is Logo? And Who Needs It?
  • Where’s the Elephant?
  • Why School Reform Is Impossible
  • About Seymour Papert
  • Print Archives
  • Multimedia
  • Ways to Help
  • Technology in Schools: Local fix or Global Transformation?
  • Logo as Trojan Horse: Rethinking Logo Philosophy in the Context of a Real School Experience
  • Seymour Papert on ABC Radio – Sunday Profile
  • Seymour Papert’s American Prospect Speech
  • Seymour Papert on Online Learning and Universities
  • Seymour Papert’s CUE Keynote (May 2000)
  • Let’s Tie the Digital Knot
  • Misconceptions about Logo
  • Multimedia
The Daily Papert

Daily words & wisdom of Dr. Seymour Papert

  • “Now I Know Why We Have Nouns and Verbs”
  • 1994 Keynote at National School Boards Conference
  • A Critique of Technocentrism in Thinking About the School of the Future
  • About
  • An Evaluative Study of Modern Technology in Education
  • An Evaluative Study of Modern Technology in Education
  • An Exploration in the Space of Mathematics Educations
  • Bode Miller
  • Child Power: Keys to the New Learning of the Digital Century
  • Computer as Condom
  • Computer as Material: Messing About with Time
  • Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking
  • Computers in the Classroom: Agents of Change
  • Constructionism vs. Instructionism
  • Constructionism: A New Opportunity for Elementary Science Education
  • Diversity in Learning: A Vision for the New Millennium
  • Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning
  • Educational Computing: How Are We Doing?
  • Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete
  • Event Programming in Logo
  • Ghost in the Machine: Seymour Papert on How Computers Fundamentally Change the Way Kids Learn
  • Hard Fun
  • Ian’s Truck
  • Introduction to Embodiments of Mind by Warren S. McCulloch
  • It Takes a Whole State to Raise its Schools
  • Keynote address – Kids and Computer – What’s a Parent to Do? – MIT, September 1991
  • Keynote address – 1992 New Jersey Educational Computing Conference
  • Keynote address – New Jersey Educational Computing Conference 1990
  • Learning by the Skin of His Teeth
  • LogoWriter Tape 1 (1986)
  • LogoWriter Tape 2 (1986)
  • Looking at Technology Through School-Colored Spectacles
  • MIT Logo Memo Archive
  • My Learning Disability
  • Obsolete Skill Set: The 3 Rs — Literacy and Letteracy in the Media Ages
  • Paper for the President’s Commission for a National Agenda for the 80s
  • Papert Excerpts from an MIT Media Lab Interactive Videodisc (1986)
  • Papert on Logo (c. 1986)
  • Papert On Logo: “New MicroWorlds – Tape 2, Teaching (c. 1986)
  • Papert on Piaget
  • Papert’s Principle
  • Perestroika and Epistemological Politics
  • Preface to The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer
  • Professor Papert Discusses One Laptop Per Child Project
  • Redefining Childhood: The Computer Presence as an Experiment in Developmental Psychology
  • Redefining Childhood: The Computer Presence as an Experiment in Developmental Psychology
  • School’s Out?
  • Semi-annual Constructionism Conference Archives
  • Seymour Papert – Bates College
  • Seymour Papert 2002 Interview
  • Seymour Papert Obituary (1928 – 2016)
  • Seymour Papert Obituary Collection
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 1 – Grammar (1986)
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 2 – Names and Variables (1986)
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 3 – Images of Recursion (1986)
  • Seymour Papert On Logo: Hurdles – Tape 4 – Digging Deeper (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 1 – Resonances (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 2 – Teaching (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 3 – Thinking (1986)
  • Seymour Papert on Logo: New Mindstorms Tape 4 – Styles (1986)
  • Seymour Papert One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Interview
  • Seymour Papert’s Valedictory Speech Upon Being Named LEGO Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab
  • Situating Constructionism
  • Some Poetic and Social Criteria for Education Design
  • SUNDAY INTERVIEW
  • Technology in Schools: Local fix or Global Transformation?
  • Technology Works Enterprises Proposal
  • THE CHALLENGES OF IDC: What have we learned from our past? A conversation with Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky, and Alan Kay
  • The Future of School
  • The Future of School
  • The Gears of My Childhood
  • The Learning State
  • The Lessons of Logo
  • The Lessons of Logo
  • The Parent Trap
  • The Wonderful Discovery of Nothing
  • Tomorrow’s Classrooms?
  • Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right but Three Rights Do Make a Left
  • Vision for Education: The Caperton-Papert Platform
  • What is Logo? And Who Needs It?
  • Where’s the Elephant?
  • Why School Reform Is Impossible
  • About Seymour Papert
  • Print Archives
  • Multimedia
  • Ways to Help
  • Technology in Schools: Local fix or Global Transformation?
  • Logo as Trojan Horse: Rethinking Logo Philosophy in the Context of a Real School Experience
  • Seymour Papert on ABC Radio – Sunday Profile
  • Seymour Papert’s American Prospect Speech
  • Seymour Papert on Online Learning and Universities
  • Seymour Papert’s CUE Keynote (May 2000)
  • Let’s Tie the Digital Knot
  • Misconceptions about Logo
  • Multimedia

April 5, 2012

1990s, Computers, Constructionism, Epistemology, Learning, Logo, Mathematics, Project-based learning, School Reform, Teaching, uncategorized / By gary

“More than 20 years ago, I was working on a project at the Muzzey Junior High School in Lexington, MA, which had been persuaded by Wally Feuerzeig to allow a seventh grade to “do Logo” instead of math for that year. This was a brave decision for a principal who could not have known that the students would actually advance their math achievement score, even though they didn’t do anything that resembled normal school math that year!

But the story I really want to tell is not about test scores. It is not even about the math/Logo class. It is about the art room I used to pass on the way. For a while, I dropped in periodically to watch students working on soap sculptures and mused about ways in which this was not like a math class. In the math class students are generally given little problems which they solve or don’t solve pretty well on the fly. In this particular art class they were all carving soap, but what each students carved came from wherever fancy is bred and the project was not done and dropped but continued for many weeks. It allowed time to think, to dream, to gaze, to get a new idea and try it and drop it or persist, time to talk, to see other people’s work and their reaction to yours–not unlike mathematics as it is for the mathematician, but quite unlike math as it is in junior high school. I remember craving some of the students’ work and learning that their art teacher and their families had first choice. I was struck by an incongruous image of the teacher in a regular math class pining to own the products of his students’ work! An ambition was born: I want junior high school math class to be like that. I didn’t know exactly what “that” meant but I knew I wanted it. I didn’t even know what to call the idea. For a long time it existed in my head as “soap-sculpture math.””

Papert, S. and Harel, I. (1991) “Situating Constructionism” in Constructionism. NY: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

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