“An examination of computer use in schools today reveals that students’ interactions with computers are largely teacher-directed, workbook-oriented, for limited periods of time, and confined to learning about the machines themselves or about programming languages. Further, computers are located in separate labs and are not integrated into the standard curriculum. “Doing computer” in school is […]
“Certain notions of mathematics are not sufficiently embedded in the culture for children to learn in their natural way, so they come to school to learn them. Once children are in school, we try to impose mathematics on them in much the same way it was imposed on us: we begin by making them work
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“Logo is much like a natural language such as English. Baby talk allows the child an easy way to grab onto and use pieces of the language. But nowhere in the world is a language restricted to baby talk. The child continues to be immersed in the full richness of language as used by philosophers
“Children seem to be such remarkable learners on their own, but then they enter school. Some succeed in school, and it is impressive that they learn as successfully as they do. But many if not most children somehow do not seem to learn very well in school. Why is it that these people who learn
“I shall describe learning paths that have led hundreds of children to becoming quite sophisticated programmers. Once programming is seen in the proper perspective, there is nothing very surprising about the fact that this should happen. Programming a computer means nothing more or less than communicating to it in a language that it and the
“Our culture tends to equate soft with feminine and feminine with unscientific and undisciplined. “ Papert, S. and Turkle, S. (1990) Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete. Versions of this article appeared in the Journal of Mathematical Behavior, Vol. 11, No.1, in March, 1992, pp. 3-33; Constructionism, I. Harel & S. Papert, Eds.
“The computer can be a partner in a great diversity of relationships. The computer is an expressive medium that different people can make their own in their own way. But people who want to approach the computer in a “non-canonical” style are rarely given the opportunity to do so. They are discouraged by the dominant
“When I met Piaget my passion for understanding mathematics came together with my desire to know how the mind works and to create a theory of intelligence. Plaget fascinated me because he managed in the same breath to say something both about the nature of mathematics and issues fundamental to philosophy and at the same
“In describing bricoleur programmers, we have made analogies to sculptors, cooks, and painters. Bricoleurs are also like writers who don’t use an outline but start with one idea, associate to another, and find a connection with a third. In the end, an essay “grown” through negotiation and association is not necessarily any less elegant or
“In Mindstorms (Papert, 1980), I asked (choosing one out of a vast number of possible examples) why the quadratic equation of the parabola is included in the mathematical knowledge every educated citizen is expected to know. Saying that it is “good math” is not enough reason: The curriculum includes only a minute sliver of the