Question by kid reporters: Some adults are afraid of computers, but kids love them. Why? Answer by Seymour Papert: “I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it is the most important question in the world. Children feel that computers are their thing. As children grow up, they’ll be doing everything in a […]
“Indeed, we might summarize all these points by saying that schoolchildren have been deprived of the opportunity of actually doing mathematics in any sense even thinly related to the working activity of mathematicians. Thus, it is not surprising that children resist, that they seldom carry over their training informal manipulation into less formal situations, and
On April, 24, 2014, the MIT Media Lab hosted a forum, “Learning from Seymour Papert,” featuring long-time friends and colleagues, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, and Marvin Minsky, along with one of Papert’s former students, MIT Professor Mitchel Resnick. I’m grateful that the lab recorded and shared video of the event. Enjoy! The Daily Papert is a
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“Everyone works with procedures in everyday life. Playing a game or giving directions to a lost motorist are exercises in procedural thinking. But in everyday life procedures are lived and used, they are not necessarily reflected on. In the LOGO environment, a procedure becomes a thing that is named, manipulated, and recognized as the children
“Throughout this essay, I use the word “mathematics” as a stand in for all disciplines. I use the word “math” to refer to the largely obsolete stuff they teach in schools.” Papert, S. (2006). After How Comes What. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (Vol. 2, pp. 581-586). Cambridge:
“The relation of school children to mathematics remains deeply puzzling after more than a decade of wide-scale experiment in the classroom and in the cognitive laboratory. The extent of the puzzle is often obscured by popular prejudices about mathematics and about children. For if one asks: “why cannot every child learn algebra in a week?” the answer
“Approaching Logo as an idea in development rather than a fixed thing to be judged has placed me in a third position in relation to debates between people who think Logo is great and those who think it has “failed.” Just as Logo encourages children to see bugs as positive things to think about, so
“Many children are held back in their learning because they have a model of learning in which you have either ‘got it’ or ‘got it wrong.’ But when you program a computer you almost never get it right the first time. Learning to be a master programmer is learning to become highly skilled at isolating
“You learn in the deepest way when something happens that makes you fall in love with a particular piece of knowledge. “ Papert, S. (1987, July). Microworlds: transforming education. In Artificial intelligence and education (Vol. 1, pp. 79-94). The Daily Papert is a service of Constructing Modern Knowledge, the world’s premiere educational event for educators to learn-by-doing.