“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 …
“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 …
“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 …
“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. …
“Children, of course, come into the world as very powerful, highly competent learners, and the learning they do in the first few years of life is actually awesome. A child exploring the immediate world does that pretty thoroughly in an experiential, self-directed way. But when you see something in your immediate world that really represents …
“In The Children’s Machine I told a learning story about how I helped a student in the “resource room”—which is where they send the kids who are supposed to have learning disabilities—of a public school in one of our big cities. I was able to guess why this kid was looking all around him with …
“I have had a lot of flack from people who read this column (and other things I have written) as advocating taking the hard work and discipline out of learning. I don’t blame them. I am a critic of the ways in which traditional school forces kids to learn and most attempts to introduce a …
Curator’s Note: Thanks to the Internet Archive, I found this long-lost article by Dr. Papert written for the March 1981 issue Creative Computing magazine. (Creative Computing played a major role in my adolescent development as I learned to program through 7th-12th grade). Enjoy the first of many excerpts to be shared from this article. – …