In 1999, Seymour Papert embarked on his last ambitious institutional research project when he created the constructionist, technology-rich, project-based, multi-aged Constructionist Learning Laboratory inside of Maine’s troubled prison for teens, The Maine Youth Center. Shortly after the start of the three year project, Papert outlined the Eight Big Ideas behind the Constructionist Learning Laboratory. Although …
Papert wrote the following in the second issue of Wired Magazine back in 1993! “I see then a pattern of intellectual development that I shall oversimplify by casting it in three distinct phases. The first phase is one of universally successful learning. All children show a passion for interactive exploration of their immediate world. The …
“Literacy refers not just to being able to read, but to having taken in a whole culture around reading, a culture which usually comes through reading. With multimedia, the role of the written word may become much less important. In the future I suspect we will be less likely to associate people who are educated …
“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 …
“Much of what the child learns we don’t even notice.” Papert, S. (1984). Computer as Mudpie. Intelligent Schoolhouse: Readings on Computers and Learning. D. Peterson. Reston, VA, Reston Publishing Company. Note: A higher-quality version of this article will be uploaded shortly.
“I am talking about a revolution in ideas that is no more reducible to technologies than physics and molecular biology are reducible to the technological tools used in the laboratories or poetry to the printing press. In my vision, technology has two roles. One is heuristic: The computer presence has catalyzed the emergence of ideas. …
“If you need to know whether drug X reduces blood-pressure, you may fairly safely draw a negative conclusion from a “treatment model” experiment in which hospitalized patients were given X and no change in blood-pressure was observed. On the other hand, you would not deduce that drug Y does not increase fertility from the simple …