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.
New Book Honors the Legacy of Seymour Papert Read More »
Attached is a 1988 paper written by the designers of LEGO TC Logo, Seymour Papert, Steve Ocko, and Mitchel Resnick.
LEGO, Logo, and Design Read More »
This document was created by MIT Media Lab colleagues, Rozalind Picard, Seymour Papert, Walter Bender, Bruce Blumberg, Cynthia Breazeal, David Cavallo, Tod Machover, Mitchel Resnick, Deb Roy and Carol Strohecker in 2004. .
Affective Learning — a manifesto Read More »
This interview appears to have been recorded for the 2002 Squeakers documentary DVD by a team from Ball State University. Transcription attached.
Outtakes from Seymour Papert’s Squeakers DVD Interview Read More »
“Many children who grow up in our cities are surrounded by the artifacts of science but have good reason to see them as belonging to “the others”; in many case they are perceived as belonging to the social enemy. Still other obstacles are more abstract, though ultimately of the same nature. Most branches of the
Thought of the Day from Seymour Papert Read More »
Eight Big Ideas Behind the Constructionist Learning Lab By Dr. Seymour Papert (1999) From the Ph.D. dissertation, “An Investigation of Constructionism in the Maine Youth Center,” by Gary Stager, 2007. A number of translations of this document into other languages may be found here. The first big idea is learning by doing. We all learn
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Seymour Papert makes several profound points in this very short clip from a 1991 conference keynote. The complete video, along with its transcript may be found here. “Another way of describing what school does to children is infantilizing them, treating them like children so to speak. Now, one’s got to be careful playing with that
Alan Kay and Seymour Papert testify before a rogue’s gallery of Congressional misfits and a clueless venture capitalist. In October 1995, the House Committee Economic and Educational Opportunities and House Science Committees held a nearly three-hour hearing to examine “technological advances in education.” The first two hours or so of the hearing are a
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