This video, circa 1986, was created to promote the new LEGO TC Logo robotics material and filmed at Boston’s Hennigan School as part of Project Headlight. The materials being used were prototypes for what became the first ever commercially available programmable robotics construction kit for children, LEGO TC Logo.
Seymour Papert: This is an attempt to make a sketch of what a school of the future might be like. Now nobody really knows what the future will be like, but we know what it won’t be like. We know it won’t be lots of children sitting in desks with pencil and paper writing all the day. We know that these new technologies, these computers will be an important part of it.
If you go into any. School or any home, you’ll find many pencils, many crayons, many paintbrushes because these are instruments that people made part of their lives. They use the pencil whenever they have a need for it to draw, to write a story, to calculate. And so with the computer, the natural instrument for doing mathematics, for music, for a hundred other things, and our goal here is to make it sufficiently part of the culture of the place that everybody uses it when it’s needed.
There are many aspects, what goes on in the school. We see children here writing stories in other parts of the school, we see music, we see very special projects. Like Lego logo. This might sound like playing with toys, but that’s just what’s so clever about it. They are playing with toys in a very sophisticated way.
Nicky: It’s getting stuck in the little holes.
Yeah, because of the windows I know and is pulling over here big time pole. So we turn the windows around. Can the painting button wait for report six is a sensor that we have on it that will soon them.
Student: So what.
Nicky: This is part of it floor, and there’s a little sand down here, and when it hits that, when the elevator comes up, see it’s looking for something.
The elevator comes up and presses it, presses the little button up. It’ll reverse the direction and I’ll call elevator again. I do up now get it.
Seymour Papert: The Lego logo project is one in which children build with the construction set Lego, and then interface their construction. Computers so that they can control them. The children are learning to program. They’re learning important ideas about motion, about feedback. They’re learning principles of engineering design.
Above all, they’re learning that knowledge is a unified thing and that. The scientific and formal and mathematical knowledge is not something separate from their passion for toys from the things they did since they were small children before they even came to school.
Student: Then I got put then, then I got, put this part, I gotta put this part on.
Teacher speaking in background: Okay, let’s go up the pine.
Student: I gotta put this part on.
Sylvia Weir: Skills of children vary. As you know, there’s this wide range of naturally preferred activities, things that kids do well at, and some of the children who perhaps aren’t doing so well at. At language type activity can do particularly well at, um, manipulating things, at understanding mechanisms in space and in spatial thinking about spatial relationships and working things out.
The kind of thing that I’m interested in, which I call spatial reasoning, and I saw, we saw together the way this learning disabled kid who’s learning disabled in the classroom because so much of the curriculum is language based and when it comes to a place like this. He just falls right into stuff that he can do very well.
He has very strong intuitions about how to put things together and to provide this kind of environment for children like that, I think is going to make a very big difference to their academic outcome because they can come towards the more formal stuff via this route of entering into this, the way they play with their, their toys at home.
Student: Hey Steve. Look it. I’ll have to go up there. I could go like this. I can push the switch and it goes back. If I could go like this and go forward.
Female student: A whole bunch of procedures lead into different procedures,
right?
So in this. Motor two turns on right, and it weights a certain amount, it’ll, it’ll keep going for maybe if I said 360, it’ll keep going for 360, right? And then it goes off and motor one turns on and it weights exactly 500.
Nicky: Right?
Female student: So that motor one is the swings.
Teacher speaking in background: Okay?
Female student: So after this shuts off, it’ll motors will switch. And this will turn for however long. 500 is 500 uhhuh, and then that’ll shut off and that’s the end of the procedure.
Teacher speaking in background: Okay.
Female student: Number one
B would be on a, on a.
Okay. And now that I have that, I have to go down and make a decision and make that shut off.
Nicky: When the census sees the white table, it goes forward. But if the black. It turned.
I was experimenting
at first. I made a big thing about like six six by three inches. And the motor wasn’t pa Oh. And then when I put it on the table and turned it on to see if it would vibrate and move, it busted the heart into about like 15 pieces. Yeah, so then I decided to make it smaller. So I made it smaller, and now it looks fine.