“Games never advertise as being easy; rather, how difficult. Kid never say schools is too hard; they say it’s boring. Yet we still insist on “making it easier.” Game designers know that if games aren’t hard, they will go out business. Well, curriculum designers must make it easy to get through, to encourage more curriculum […]
“Information technology is the wrong name, and leads to its misuse. The fact that you can get a lot of information out of the Net is NOT merely what it’s about. Most digital technologies — processors and chips, for example — are not about information at all. They are constructional medium…we make things from them.
We describe four major milestones in our development: 1. In the late sixties we recognized that while computers have tremendous potential for use in education, the technology of that time was marginally effective and too expensive. We consequently adopted a strategy of preparing for a future which has now arrived 2. For the first half
“What an individual can learn, and how he learns it, depends on what models he has available. This raises, recursively, the question of how he learned these models. Thus the “laws of learning” must be about how intellectual structures grow out of one another and about how, in the process, they acquire both logical and
“Once I was alerted to the concept of “hard fun” I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to
“Just as pendulums, paints, clay, and so forth, can be “messed around with,” so can computers. Many people associate computers with a rigid style of work, but this need not be the case. Just as a pencil drawing reflects each artist’s individual intellectual style, so too does work on the computer.” Papert, S. & Frantz,
Papert has been criticized for taking video games seriously–and for soliciting a $3 million grant from Nintendo to develop learning tools that look and feel more like video games than schoolbooks. The three-year project ended last year, but Papert makes no apologies for it. “Change in education isn’t just going to come from ivory-tower academics,”
“Any adult who thinks one of these games is easy need only sit down and try to master one,” he writes. “Most are hard, with complex information–as well as technique–to be mastered.” Video games empower children “to test out ideas about working within prefixed rules and structures in a way few other toys are capable
“I was observing a child working with a C.A.I. program for multiplication. There was something strange going on. I had seen the child do several multiplications quickly and accurately. Then I saw him give a series of wrong answers to easier problems. It took me a while to realize that the child had become bored
Educators should “start clearing their heads about notions that computers are expensive. Every child should have a computer like an Apple II.” Mr. Papert noted that New York City schools spend more than $30,000 on a student over the course of his 13 years of public schooling. If the computer were priced at its manufacturing