By Gary S. Stager, PhD & Sylvia Libow (June 8, 2026) In 1965, Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at MIT, wrote a paper arguing that artificial intelligence was heading toward a dead end. He claimed the entire enterprise was built on a false assumption about how human minds work. Dreyfus asserted that computers, no matter
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In 1966, The Elementary Science Study published a curriculum, Behavior of Mealworms. It provided opportunities for children to engage in many scientific pursuits with readily accessible larval form of a darkling beetle. In 1977, Hal Abelson and Paul Goldenberg of the MIT AI/Logo Laboratory, published a paper, Teacher’s Guide for Computational Models of Animal Behavior.
The book celebrates the 50th anniversary of a seminal paper by Cynthia Solomon and Seymour Papert. Published in 1971, Twenty Things to Do with a Computer, set the course of education for the next fifty years and beyond. I created the new book, Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50, to honor the vision set forth by Papert and Solomon a half-century ago. Four dozen experts from around the world invite us to consider the original provocations, reflect on their implementation, and chart a course for the future through personal recollections, learning stories, and imaginative scenarios.
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“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
“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
“Thus in its embodiment as the physical computer, computation opens a vast universe of things to do. But the real magic comes when this is combined with the conceptual power of theoretical ideas associated with computation.” Papert S. (1980). Teaching Children Thinking in Taylor, R., Ed., The Computer in School: Tutor, Tool, Tutee. New York:
“I end by mentioning two less specific “firsts” with which “Teaching Children Thinking” should be credited. At that time the concept of computers in education was synonymous with CAI (computer assisted instruction). I believe that “Teaching Children Thinking” was the first published paper to suggest that the child could be in charge of the machine
“Some of my colleagues are disappointed that School manages to so dilute the ideas or so circumscribe their impact that they can be “integrated” into an essentially unchanged system. I have learned to see things differently through my Piaget-trained eyes. At the core of Piaget’s theory of development is the process he calls assimilation: when
“Although printed in 1970, “Teaching Children Thinking” was conceived in 1968 and bears the signs of the heady atmosphere of that time. Across the society change was in the air, deeply rooted assumptions were being challenged. On a smaller and less active but not less radical scale challenges to taken-for-granted ideas about children, about education