This video is a 1983 Nova episode, Talking Turtle.
Talking Turtle Transcription
[00:00:05] Narrator (2): A baby of the computer age by typing any four keys. The horse appears for her. It’s a play thing. But her education and development will be transformed by it.
Will she be programmer or programmed
when she sets off for school? The world in which she will learn will be invaded by the computer.
The traditional classroom faces a serious challenge.
Kids are hooked on computer games. That fascination may be the spark which sets the development of the human mind on a new course.
This is the story of one man’s views. Of what that course could be.
The turtle is a small robot plugged into a computer here in Boston, Massachusetts. An area of the kindergarten has been made into a forest. A 5-year-old sends the turtle roaming, driving it with simple instructions, F for forward, B for backward, L for left, R for right. These are the simple commands of a computer language called logo, a language designed for learning its use in schools raises controversial questions about how we learn.
In a London school, seven year olds use similar instructions to drive an imaginary turtle on a journey around the planets. FD for forward RT for right turn by combining forward and turns, they can send it anywhere they like
[00:02:51] child (7): too much.
[00:02:58] Narrator (2): Here the turtle is an arrowhead. Um, there’s the arrow if you can see it there. And that’s where the turtle is. Yeah, we call, its more clearly. Um, we named it after him, a person that invented logo and he was seen more. Puppet logo was designed for learning and it’s unique in this respect. No other language was designed for that purpose.
[00:03:26] Seymour Papert: Basic and its variants such as Pilot, which are most commonly used, were made for totally different purposes, and were handed on like castoff clothing to be used by the world of education. I think this is a scandal.
[00:03:41] Narrator (2): Professor Seymour Papert is horrified. Not only that we foisted an inappropriate computer language like basic on our children, but that at the same time, many classrooms misuse the computers they have.
They make the computer instruct the child. Parents worry that children waste their time on the computer, but Papert sees the danger of misuse as something far more subtle. When the computer is used primarily to reinforce traditional rote learning with drill and practice routines, the specter of an Orwellian world is not so remote.
To use a powerful technology like this as a substitute for chalk and talk is alienating and inhibits change.
[00:04:26] Seymour Papert: The typewriter keyboard has a lesson for anyone interested in change. The query arrangement, Q-W-E-R-T-Y comes from the way the early typewriters were always jamming. Someone thought of preventing this by separating the most frequently type letters.
New keyboards can’t jam, but millions of fingers had learned the old keyboard. So QWERTY remains. We have new technologies for learning. But will the layout of schooling resist them?
[00:05:01] Narrator (2): The computer offers us a chance to reorganize the way we learn. Instead of being given knowledge by a hierarchy of experts, we can discover it for ourselves by building our own knowledge from scratch with the computer and a high level language like logo, which uses large amounts of memory and does a lot of work for you.
Philip and his friends have given the commands to draw a square forward. 50, right, 90. Now they have given it a name S. Anytime they type an S, the computer will repeat the square by entering s and a degree for the turn. They can build more complicated and dynamic designs. A logo computer will take words or graphics, but children find turtle graphics most fun.
[00:05:47] Music: And if we are lucky, we do. Yeah, let’s hold. That is brilliant. Keep your fingers, we’ve done it. Keep your fingers crossed.
[00:06:01] Narrator (2): Pap designed logo with colleagues from the Artificial Intelligence lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[00:06:07] Seymour Papert: We tried to achieve a number of goals. First of all. That it should be easily accessible.
There should be corners of the language that you can get into, like baby talk, getting into English that are easy for the youngest beginner, but it shouldn’t be a toy language. It’s not that logo is easy. It’s easy to get into, but once you’re in there, you can progress to the most sophisticated ideas in the world of programming, just as in English.
You can start off with baby talk, but the same language. He’s also the vehicle for expression of poets and philosophers
[00:06:44] Child: and like in a car,
[00:06:45] Narrator (2): Ben is eight. He’s engaged in serious discussion with Papert about his program for Sprites. He likes these dynamic objects, which he can call up by name and program into highly active designs.
Sure. He’s kept all his ideas in a book. Typically, his handwriting doesn’t give any clues to the complexity and achievement of his programming.
[00:07:06] Child: I think it was in second grade. I’ll show you that one. Would you like see?
[00:07:12] Seymour Papert: Sure.
[00:07:12] Child: All right. Oh,
like bursts out onto the screen and then goes back in. We call that a home.
[00:07:26] Seymour Papert: A home.
[00:07:27] Child: Yeah. That means like that’s the middle of the screen. Like is it home? And it tells it like to come home. No higher than a 1 27. What number?
[00:07:36] Seymour Papert: About 55 speed limit.
Oh wow.
[00:07:44] Child: See, you see the planes and the trucks than the rockets and the balls and then the squares
and it’s really mean.
[00:07:55] Narrator (2): Objects whizzing around the screen. Give this generation of children experiences never before available children learn by experience of the world around them. That was the message of the Swiss Educationalist Jean Pi. Hearing it Schools brought everyday objects into the classroom, creating a revolution in the education of young children.
Crayon glue, cardboard blocks. These are the standard building materials from which children build their minds. Papert worked with Piaget and realized that the computer should come in along with the mud pies.
[00:08:31] Seymour Papert: What we really have to think about is what produces involvement, engagement, what grabs the individual?
And so it’s much more related to love than to logic. It’s much more related to sex than to abstraction. It’s much more related to how you see yourself as fitting into the social and cultural fabric, including how you see television. Is it something that’s being done to you or something you want to appropriate that it’s a matter of of, of knowing how to put subject matter in the right sort of logical order in order for people to understand it.
Education has very little to do with explanation. It has to do with engagement, with falling in love with the material.
When I was two, I was already fascinated by rotating things, wheels, gears, pulleys. I loved their beauty, I loved their logic. I thought about how fast small ones drive slow, big ones. I had no idea I was preparing myself to become a mathematician, but I was. When teachers talk about ratio and about equations, most children find these ideas, abstract, alien, I did not.
My world of rotations made them concrete, friendly for me. Gears and wheels. Had become objects to think with. I’ve tried to invent new kinds of lovable objects that are good to think with. Most successful so far are the turtles, plastic robots. Arrows on screens. Hyperactive, sprites all belong to the same turtle family. They all obey the same commands. By getting to know these turtles as they get to know a person. These children are learning to be mathematicians. This is Piaget’s real message, learning rooted in experience.
[00:10:42] Music: Back back six two
[00:10:48] Narrator (2): forward 60, right?
Turn forward, 60 again. The turtle is giving children a feeling for the properties of an angle. They can experience an abstract concept and make it personal.
[00:11:00] Music: Yeah, no.
[00:11:10] Narrator (2): The body centered commands of logo are closely related to the natural way we move. These children from Old Oak Primary London are going to play Turtle. By walking out the shapes, they eventually want their turtles to draw on the screens.
[00:11:25] Intro Music: 4, 6, 6.
[00:11:28] Narrator (2): One child is pretending to be the turtle. The others give commands.
[00:11:32] Music: No 10 left. Left the, yeah. 4, 6, 5.
White turned right. Two places. Two places. Yeah. Not, oh, why A little left, left, left. A bit left. One pace. Left, left, left. Must left, left, left, left. Oh, come on. Hurry up.
[00:12:06] Seymour Papert: The essential point about the turtle is its role as a transitional object that is a transitional between the body, the self, and abstract mathematical ideas.
The turtle can be, you can identify with it, you can move your body in order to guess how to command the turtle. So it’s related to you, to the body, to the human. And it’s also related to mathematical ideas ’cause its structure is such that it captures. Some extremely powerful geometric and physical ideas.
Watch how this turtle moves and draws as it goes. At the heart of the geometry of physics is the combination of movements.
The total has a retractable pen in the middle. When the wheels turn in opposite directions, the turtle rotates around the pen. When they turn in the same direction, it moves forwards and draws a line straight as an arrow.
The wheels are driven by independent motors, which turn in unison at exactly the same speed. Of course, for this, the total must be built as a precision scientific instrument. Despite its appearance, it’s no Tory.
[00:13:43] Intro Music: If you feel satisfied,
[00:13:43] Narrator (2): the math room at Crabtree Primary was the first classroom in England to have a turtle. We all accept that we learn French more easily in France than from a textbook, so why not create a math land where kids can learn to talk about math? Turtles create such an environment pepper challenges.
Why should half the population be afraid of numbers and confused by abstract concepts? Girls enjoy turtle mathematics as well as boys. Today the girls are programming the turtle to draw dice. They’ve got the outline, now they’re experimenting with shapes. They’re trying to decide what would be the best shape for the spots.
[00:14:24] Music: Why? I dunno, it’s not gonna be a hexagon. Should be more sharp
space.
[00:14:45] Narrator (2): But how does the turtle help them with their math teacher, Beryl Maxwell?
[00:14:50] Beryl Maxwell: The great thing is it does provide a mathematical environment for the children, and while the children are working around the turtle, if you listen to the things that they’re talking about, it’s all mathematical. And I think verbalization in mathematics is very important, and I think that half of our problems with mathematics teaching is because children don’t communicate mathematically, talk about mathematics and actually experience mathematical.
Problems.
[00:15:20] Music: Oh no. What were you intending to do then? What? Determining to get a hexagon. Oh, you want a hexagon? Yes. Why do you want a
[00:15:28] Beryl Maxwell: hexagon?
[00:15:28] Music: Because we want to put hexagon from the dice. We just want to see how we can get hexagon. Then we going to choose the best of these three shapes to put on all sides.
[00:15:38] Beryl Maxwell: Oh, I see. Now what shapes have you got not to gun? Definitely good,
[00:15:42] Music: but if this doesn’t work, we’ll probably use that one depending on what this one turns out as. But what we are going to do is forward four and left 60. I want to try it. Why do you want to try 60? Because the angle, the best side
[00:15:56] Beryl Maxwell: you have.
So now you’re going back. Yeah, you’re going to try 60, right? So what instruction do you think you need to put into turn, Pete? We need pen. The teacher’s role is really to stand back and assess when to interfere. I think that using the floor turtle has personally made me think very carefully about the questions I ask children, how I ask the questions, and when to ask the question.
[00:16:25] Music: Yeah, you may as well do
this. Going in this direction. Yes.
[00:16:40] Beryl Maxwell: It’s done what you thought it would. It’s good.
[00:16:42] Narrator (2): These children have no fear of math. They’ve learned the properties of angles by playing with shapes, and they’ve been thinking through their problem in a very natural way.
[00:16:52] Seymour Papert: The turtle started because I wanted to find something which could be picked up by very young children.
Now, I think of it as something that is as e, as va, just as valuable for people of any age as for the very young children, and, and again, that’s a general principle that what’s good for thinking is good for thinking. Whether we are a 5-year-old or a, or, or, or a sophisticated scientist.
[00:17:25] Narrator (2): Research with severely handicapped children has helped us to understand the way all children think and learn. Children who have never played with any object can control floor turtles. The Cotting School in Boston welcome the team of researchers from MIT to find out what concepts these children had built up without the experience of building, pouring, or sifting.
There it comes. Their strategy is explained by researcher Susan Joe Russell.
[00:17:55] Teacher: Because they’re not mobile, they can’t move themselves. They’re dependent on adults or older, older children To move them around is that they can’t explore space. And so understanding how things fit together in the world and what behind means and what happens when something goes behind something else is something that they haven’t had a lot of experience with here.
They’ve got a little world in which they can control how something moves around in space. I
[00:18:25] Teenager: think we have a key stuck together. Send it right into Andy, or you go
[00:18:29] Teacher: Alex and Nikki, who. Or the two boys who, um, are both non-vocal and have very impaired hand use. Um, we see several things going on with them. Um, one is that this provides an activity around around which shared communication takes place.
And that’s extremely important for them. The second thing that we see with them, and if you could have seen them in the session before this, you, you would see the change. Um, getting to have more control over their hand use is something that we’ve noticed with several of the children. And Mickey had a very hard time at the beginning operating the button box, simply getting his hand to the button that he wanted to get to, and then getting his hand off when he wanted to stop pushing that button.
[00:19:17] Narrator (2): The button box is a simplified keyboard. In using it, the children are preparing themselves for programming. It gives them control over their environment, which has a terrific payoff.
[00:19:49] Child: Now what
[00:20:00] Intro Music: we going.
[00:20:07] Child: Way good. Here we go.
[00:20:17] Narrator (2): Watching these children tackling the problem of how to knock the tower down gives us an idea of what is going on in their heads. Until now, children like these have had very little chance to express themselves. But the computer environment releases their trapped intelligence. It gives them a way to share their thoughts by providing them with a scratch pad.
Sharing experiences is tremendously important for the development of social skills and language. So
[00:20:47] Teacher: he’s just gonna make a straight stem. Right.
Mario in particular, has begun to spin a lot of language around what he does on the screen, even when it doesn’t look very interesting to us. He has been developing stories, picking up words that we’ve interjected, and it gives him a medium that he’s interested in. That allows him to, to develop more language.
[00:21:19] Narrator (2): His work has developed rapidly from a few scratchy designs using simple commands.
[00:21:25] Teacher: This is an example of Mario’s, very earliest work. He called this one, I think it was a square, and this one, A fish. And this one, a circle. There wasn’t much planning involved here, and we weren’t really sure that he had anything in mind when he was doing them.
Now in contrast, as he moved along, he began to use other recognizably different elements in his work.
[00:21:56] child (7): I don’t think,
[00:21:56] Teacher: um, this was a set of stairs that he had a great deal of difficulty making. He couldn’t get the turtle to turn in the right direction, and shortly after that, he made a picture with more of a plan in mind. And this is his house and here. This is a drawing that is very different from that early work.
It shows symmetry, it shows sides of things with the same measure. Um, he had to move from here into here to get the door in the right place. And then the doorknob, which is that little line right there, and he’s using much more of the screen. And this took maybe. 40 or 50 commands to complete. So that was a process that took a great deal, more concentration than what he had been doing before this.
[00:22:49] Narrator (2): Older, severely handicapped pupils were so intrigued by the computers. They found their own ways of manipulating the keyboard. The screen is a sketch pad where they can experiment with symmetry and perspective
[00:23:01] Child: ball. I’m gonna be taking a make turn, 45.
I guess not. I’m gonna be taking a left turn now.
It’s
maybe 20.
Well, I have a dog house on one side. I have trees on both sides. I have a house in the middle. And that’s all I got so far. It’s easier than drawing it. That’s what I like about it.
[00:23:52] Narrator (2): MIT Project leader Sylvia Weir explains the prime importance of computers for learning.
[00:23:57] Sylvia Weir (2): The individual concern is absolutely in control, and that makes a very important difference to the amount of learning that takes place. There’s a cognitive, as well as an emotional reason for this because when you are actively thinking up the solution to a problem, all the mental schemes.
Come to the front of your mind into working memory, as it were, and that allows them to be scrutinized and altered. In fact, real learning can take place when you are actively in control. For the physically handicapped student, this becomes even more important because of the dependent, passive kind of life.
That such a metaphorically restricted person has led here for the first time, they can become active and take control and actually make a difference to their environment. And this has a very powerful effect on their self image, on their view, on their sense of what they are.
[00:25:29] Narrator (2): The Lamplighter school’s motto that a child is not a vessel to be filled. But a lamp to be lighted expresses their belief in child-centered learning. These youngsters in Dallas attend the school, which has the highest concentration of computers anywhere in America. A richly endowed private school of 300 pupils.
It has at least one computer for every five children.
[00:25:54] Seymour Papert: The high density of computers allows children to create their own computer culture. They experiment freely. On one great occasion, there was even a conspiracy among first graders. It led to cracking the code of knowledge teachers had decided was beyond their stage of development.
Discoveries are made and spread through a grapevine. Everyone gets to know, which kids know neat tricks. Jack is using numbers to call out sprites objects in the logo microworld. But what’s going on now? What’s the seven?
[00:26:31] Child: Um, it’s, it’s telling Sprite seven to carry the, um, ghost carry seven ghost colors.
Tell seven. Set color six, which changes him to red. Then, um, set color four, which changes in blue, and then to tell two to carry six, which is the Pac Man before it carries four, which is the thing that makes him look like he’s gobbling. And then he’s. Set colors 10, which changes into the yellow.
[00:27:07] Seymour Papert: Jack is a virtuoso of improvisation at the computer.
He creates his programs on the fly without planning moves in advance. On the other hand, this little girl, Betsy, has a classic. Programming style. Beautifully structured. It could have been written by the textbook.
[00:27:40] child (7): This is my program. Flour. It makes the flour out of, okay. Flour’s the main procedure, but it has like, let’s see. Five sub procedures is make up the main procedure and here it goes. Oh.
[00:27:57] Seymour Papert: Oh, what’s that?
[00:27:58] child (7): I think this is the flower being made. Uh, something was supposed to happen.
[00:28:07] Intro Music: What?
[00:28:08] child (7): It was supposed to make grass.
Let’s see. I forgot to, to tell the pen to go back down when I told it to pin up. So I’ll just go back and look at program and fix it. There we go.
[00:28:26] Seymour Papert: The structure of the programming has helped her isolate her mistake easily in one mind sized bite. There’s no stress, no sense of. Failure.
[00:28:36] child (7): It’s formed by making pedals out of one program that makes one pedal.
Then I put it in another program to make lots of pedals, which that program that makes a lot of the pedals,
um, goes into program and there’s a stem and sky.
[00:29:00] Narrator (2): Each child operates the computer in their own way to suit their own personalities. In their own style of thinking and learning, but even here, Betsy’s carefully structured approach receives more approval than Jack’s trial and error tactics.
[00:29:15] Seymour Papert: These children in Dallas live in a computer rich environment.
Many have computers at home as well as at school, and can use them whenever they want. They are the privileged ones in our society who are being prepared to take charge in the future. Their computer experience gives them more knowledge. It also reinforces their sense that knowledge is power. I believe society is at a crossroads.
Will we use the computers to democratize education? Or will we allow them to perpetuate past inequality? Will we use computers to offer children of the inner city educational experiences the rich have always had? Will they too come to feel that knowledge is power? A few good projects in the ghettos are a drop in the ocean.
But I believe they are raising consciousness. Every child who has attended one is an ambassador for the growing social movement that demands a computer for every child.
[00:30:16] Narrator (2): An inner city community center in conjunction with Atari. Gave some Boston Children a chance to learn logo.
[00:30:23] Teacher: Alright, what’s the first thing you have to write for a procedure?
[00:30:26] Narrator (2): Um,
[00:30:28] Child: two square. Hey, good for you.
[00:30:32] Narrator (2): Some of what is most powerful about logo was already visible when Nova filmed these students after only their first three hour session.
[00:30:42] Teenager: Okay.
[00:31:01] Child: Two.
[00:31:07] Music: Return. Oops, I forgot to play a screen pin down. No. Yeah.
S return
[00:31:25] Child: now. That’s all I had to do step by step to get that one simple. S. It was very confusing how to do that. One step of s
[00:31:36] Music: I’m trying to, I’m trying to get a square right here, but I can’t figure it out yet.
[00:31:43] Teacher: Is the turtle in the same place where it was when you first made that? Hmm. Lisa Del IT logo teacher.
You’ve seen the community around here. It’s a poor community and generally speaking, when poor kids are put into work with a computer. In schools, which is not very often, but when it does happen, they’re sat down at a terminal and they’re provided with computer assisted instruction, which is basically drill and rote practice of various kinds of subject matter what logo does.
Which is very different for one thing, is that rather than use rote memory and rote practice, it allows children to develop their own analytical skills. These children are analyzing their thinking as well as analyzing the process by which they will make and create procedures.
[00:32:33] Narrator (2): Darryl’s first design on the computer was a simple rectangle.
He soon discovered how to use it to make more complex designs.
[00:32:40] Child: I made three of these to make a Cuba, and that’s how I got the Cuba is
[00:32:46] Narrator (2): the local language allows him to invent a new command. He chose the word Cuba and programmed the computer to draw his design whenever this command is given. Combining Cuba with rotations makes a new pattern, and he named it after his teacher, Lisa,
[00:33:04] Teacher: behind you.
[00:33:08] Intro Music: Can you see the chart where it says
[00:33:10] Narrator (2): the program? Lisa only needs a few commands because it incorporates Cuba. And Cuba is shorthand for a longer list of instructions. Quickly grasping the building block principle for making procedures. Darryl continued making more and more complicated looking designs.
[00:33:26] Music: And what this is right here is Annette and Lisa together.
And Lauren is the longest of everything. When it stop, starts to shape like a tire with the, with the top round pieces cut off
[00:33:47] Teacher: one of the. Other things about logo is that there is no right or wrong, uh, with computer assisted instruction in most of the school day, children are faced with either being right or wrong with logo.
Anything you do is fine. If it doesn’t look the way you want it to look, then you debug it, but there’s nothing wrong in it. Different children have different ways of doing a design, and they do it that way.
[00:34:11] Narrator (2): Not all children approach the computer in the same way. Andrew’s style is totally different from Darryl’s.
He has a specific idea in mind and knows what he wants the computer to do. Okay? Actually you, you did a left 90 right here. Whoops. But it’s not always obvious how to get the turtle to do what you want before you found your bug, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. Your turtle had gone forward 30. What do you actually want your turtle to do?
[00:34:39] Child: Go straight. Okay, but does a turtle know how
[00:34:42] Narrator (2): to No. Andrew is in the midst of the debugging process. A process which requires thinking, consulting with his teacher and examining the program. Not to reject what he did wrong, but to figure out how to fix it. So it will do precisely what he wants. Okay, so you went forward 50.
Okay. So you have your, like this
[00:35:04] Teacher: and you had a write 90. Okay. But what you really want,
[00:35:07] Narrator (2): Lauren Young. Another teacher suggested that he play turtle to uncover for himself why the turtle surprised him on the screen.
This experience often gives the student that necessary clue to propel him toward his goal here successfully teaching the computer to draw a wine glass.
[00:35:35] Teacher: When children learn, when poor children or any children learn just from a computer rot skills, in a way, they’re really being programmed by the computer. Someone has decided, first of all, what basic skills are, and then those are fed. To these children. They’re not in any way in control of what’s going on.
The difference with logo is rather than the computer programming the child, the child programs, the computer, and at least from my perspective, I think that’s what we all in this community want. For our kids to allow them to be in control.
[00:36:21] Narrator (2): For Andrew and Darrell’s teacher, the educational question is inseparable from a larger social and political perspective. But not all educators placed the same emphasis on children’s control of the learning process. And although logo was designed for open-ended discovery learning, that approach has its critics.
It is in Edinburgh where one of the most thorough, thoughtful criticisms of popper’s approach has been developed. 10 years research has gone into implementing logo and the turtle for use in ordinary classrooms where there is an existing curriculum exam system and timetable. The principles which drive the Scot’s turtle are formulated from views about children’s learning, which are fundamentally opposed to those of PI and the trial and error approach.
Professor Jim
Howe
[00:37:19] Jim Howe: if someone is a novice in an area, then uh. You have to, uh, organize the knowledge in that area. Uh, otherwise the, the child will just become, um, swamped that you have to actually, uh. Point out what the best directions are, you know, to move at any time. We actually develop structured materials for the particular area in which we are interested.
So if we’re trying to teach, uh, fundamental, uh, concepts in geometry, for example. Then we would produce worksheets, which would actually, uh, provide the child with example programs which he could run and which he could experiment with.
[00:38:02] Narrator (2): In many United Kingdom Schools, logo is being modified to fit a more structured, less exploratory approach.
But does that take the heart out of it? Beryl Maxwell.
[00:38:14] Beryl Maxwell: I think that children giving the, given the opportunity to actually choose the direction in which they will go is very exciting. So much in the educational world is teacher directed. Um, we, we structure their learning because we think that they need to cover certain aspects before they can take the next step.
I agree that there is a place for structuring learning, but I think that young children should be given the, the experience and actually exploring and discovering things for themself.
[00:38:49] Narrator (2): For many of us, learning in school was a boring and alienating experience. While the learning done on the outside was fun, even when it required hard work, there is a controversy at the heart of education.
Will the computer be used as a tool to reinforce traditional learning, or does it offer us an opportunity to make radical changes?
[00:39:11] Seymour Papert: I don’t wanna come across as a computer utopian . I think this is a very, very powerful instrument that can change the way people think, the way people develop very profoundly.
I think it could go for good or for bad, and in fact, I think that all the forces are such that the path of least resistance is to produce scarily, very scary effects on the way children will develop.
[00:39:40] Narrator (2): People usually think of the scary effects of computers only in terms of video games. There is a holding power here, frightening in its intensity,
but Packard is not afraid of intensity. He believes the same. Holding power can be harnessed to make learning experiences more personal, more effective. Yet that same holding power can isolate kids, make them dependent on the computer and deprive them of individuality.
What happens is a social decision.
Before home computers, decisions about schooling and curriculum came from the top down. But with the abundance of microcomputers, things are changing. There’s a grassroots movement now where parents, teachers, and children are demanding a role for computers and education.
And with the prices continually dropping, the encroachment of home computers will be hard to resist. Some teachers are even taking matters into their own hands in order to give students a computer experience. Here in Luton, England, one teacher regularly takes a group of children home with her at lunchtime.
There are no computers in school, but in her home they can learn programming,
[00:41:14] British Teacher: very, very beginning
of doing the little shape at the beginning and doing, building it up to one of these and then building it up to six of them, and then actually printing them out on the large shape. And I’ll show you in a minute how you can do that with, um, Catherine’s.
[00:41:34] Narrator (2): Home computers using logo could well be one of the deciding factors in revolutionizing our approach to learning and our system of education.
[00:41:43] Seymour Papert: The spirit of logo is to produce a language that encourages an attitude of taking it and changing it, shaping it to to yourself. That is true of the individual.
It’s also true of cultures, and this is where I see a hope for a different kind of relationship between, between culture.
[00:42:06] Narrator (2): The car. Senegal is the home of a bold new experiment with logo. Papert believes the computer, unlike most exported technology, allows for flexibility.
Logo was specifically designed to be adapted by different cultural groups for their own needs.
[00:42:33] Seymour Papert: Logo classes at the Superior are part of a Senegalese government project. But does it make sense for an African country to experiment with giving children computers? I believe that computers can succeed here where all other media have failed miserably. They offer a way out of the vicious circle of scientific weakness in a culture breeding scientific weakness in the next generation.
I’ve watched these children become involved with computers with the same ease and the same difficulties as in london or New York or Paris.
These students are using French logo, but their drawing reflects the Senegalese countryside around them.
The village scene is captured by two teachers on the project. They’ve used logo to make a micro world in which a national language wall off is used to communicate with the computer.
[00:43:43] Narrator (2): Today is the first time the children have seen it. Cards help them identify objects by names already programmed.
Knit is the wall off word for man. And typing. It produces a man on the screen.
Other commands in wall off, make the man walk.
Now they’ve found a horse. Soon. It is hoped the children will create and name their own objects and make their own micro worlds,
creating micro worlds and using your natural language. Is one way of making logo your own. So when the Senegalese take it over, their version of the logo language will have a different structure from English or French.
[00:44:49] Seymour Papert: The next step will be to go beyond translating word by word into reconceptualizing thinking of different command structures and different things to do with it that come naturally out of their culture, the structure of their language to the way they think about graphics and shapes and sounds and everything.
[00:45:12] Narrator (2): With logo developing, nations can talk turtle in their own language. They can use computer technology to attack the problems of a developing economy. Computers will help them communicate more quickly and effectively with the west, as well as improve education at home.
[00:45:36] Seymour Papert: I tend more and more to avoid that word education.
It makes one think of doing something to the child, educating the child. Uh, the total learning environment in which the child grows up includes school, of course, includes those deliberate so-called educational acts that society does to on the child. But the most important parts are in relationship, in play, in social.
Forms in art, in sensibility to aesthetics. All this is part of the developing individual, and the computer enters into all of that
[00:46:17] juggler: with two, and I’ll start with one. That’s very good. Okay, off we go.
[00:46:23] Seymour Papert: Juggling is a complex skill made up of simple acts. Throw a ball. Catch it.
[00:46:29] juggler: Okay. Okay.
[00:46:34] Narrator (2): Juggling is. Favorite metaphor for thinking about programming
[00:46:38] juggler: under legs?
Again, you can do all the same tricks as should. There’s a double spin game.
[00:46:44] Seymour Papert: Logo programming gives children a metaphor to think about. Combining the simple to make the complex, it helps them learn to juggle. It helps them perceive and enjoy the movements of an expert juggler.
When you’ve used mathematical principles as a key to enjoyable physical activities, your feeling for mathematics is likely to be warmer, more personal. More engaged.
[00:47:19] Narrator (2): Even at an early stage, Mandy and Michelle have used the thinking process. They have learned through programming to work out the choreography of their dance.
[00:47:40] Music: First of all, we the record, then we started doing the. Beats and listening to the beats and you’ve got the beat and put it into the dance. Start off with Scott sitting down with hands together and then it Scott sitting down and repeat four with hands, gliding, side to side four times. Well, we wrote. The dance, like rere, the procedure with the computer.
If we go sideways, you’ve gotta see how many steps you take. So you’ve gotta write down all in the.
[00:48:32] Seymour Papert: I dream of helping more children experience mathematics as I do with all the intimacy of dancing. Little by little, we are learning how the computer can make bridges between the mathematical and the sensor. The abstract and the intimate
[00:48:49] Narrator (2): is the turtle and its computer, a real hope for the future. Will a generation of kids grow up with new ways of thinking?
Will the social experience of programming with all its sense of achievement, introduce a new model for education? An education system without schools as we know them, where the institutions of learning are lively, rhythmic places where novices and experts, jugglers and mathematicians, clowns and physicists get together.
They’re experimenting with this at a school in New York, optimistically named the School of the Future.
This classroom in a New York public school is a step toward a true school of the future where computer power will be as accessible as pencils and paper. It will be the first public school to take Seymour Papert truly to heart and put his principles into practice. Teacher Pete
[00:49:54] Peter Renthoff: Renthoff. So on the west side of Manhattan, we have, uh, Hispanics and blacks and, and whites and Orientals, and we have all sorts of kids.
Some of our kids read at a level of second grade. Third grade, some of them read 12.9, which is the top of the scale, and some of our most prized successes have been with some of the kids that you would feel perhaps wouldn’t do well in the computer. Now with Logo, we’ve been able to introduce these to kids who are not your great math students, and we’ve found.
One child who was almost four years behind, at least in his recorded reading score, became the top computer program in the class
[00:50:36] Intro Music: down. Can we tell you one
[00:50:38] Narrator (2): responsibility for this diverse group of students? Is shared by Steve Siegelbaym
[00:50:44] Steve Siegelbaum: We have situations where, uh, kids have been turned off to to school.
We have situations where, uh, many of the kids may have not had a positive educational experience for, for years. If, if ever oh, oh, we have, for example, not only drop outs, but we pull ’em, drop ins. Um, kids who aren’t in our class who wander by and just come into the room when they, you know, they do a double tape.
They see something going on there and they hesitantly, uh, saunter in
[00:51:19] Narrator (2): the students here use computers in all subjects. One surprise success has been in creative composition.
[00:51:26] NYC student: Well, this is supposed to be a city scene where a driver just rides along the road and then he sees a bomb on the street. The next thing you know, it blows up and it just disappears.
And then it draws two buildings. The two buildings that were regular buildings.
[00:51:45] Narrator (2): You can get some idea of the weeks of. Time and effort that went into this from the length of the printout. The teachers have noticed that after experience with programming, their students work in all subjects, was longer, better planned, and had more logical sequencing.
Working on a computer has a payoff in writing as well as in math. What did his parents think?
[00:52:10] NYC student: They were amazed at first because they didn’t think I could work on a computer. They didn’t think I knew anything about this computer. So when the teachers started showing me how to work on it,
[00:52:21] Teenager: I learned, you know, I told the computer first one of the programs that it knows then, and then I give it my program and they’ll do it.
I have a program. Making a house using similar shapes like rec, you know, the size of rec and how, and how could I put it? Um, it’s been good to me.
[00:52:47] Narrator (2): Eddie’s drawn a hacienda in the country using mathematical concepts more complex than those required by exam boards. Concepts he might have rejected in another form or context.
Anything the students learn has to have meaning for them to be useful. Like the use of French logo for Haitian students.
[00:53:09] Intro Music: Uh,
[00:53:12] Teenager: OSH Well, we were working with the program, uh, with the computers a little bit, but not much. And then when we were, we heard that there was French logo. We, you know, were interested. We have a sheet that, um, gives us the terms in English and then in French. And so we use forward backwards just in French. And then we have to tell, well, we can tell it what to do, what we wanna name our program in English or in French.
So it depends either way. Uh, what was the,
how many, what was it?
[00:53:52] Narrator (2): In addition, there is Spanish logo for those students who are more familiar with that language. Maria is involved in
[00:53:58] Teenager: changing logo English into Spanish, but like people that don’t speak English could have a chance to work with computers, but in Spanish, so not a lot of people can get to know computers,
[00:54:11] Peter Renthoff: and we find working with, with.
Logo and working with the computers that a collegial relationship develops. We work on a project together. Each kid’s project is serious. I may be working on a project. We consult with each other, kids consult with each other. Kids help other kids. Kids help adults. Kids can come up with information and ideas in all areas of of their learning in all subjects and make a contribution.
And this is what. An ideal society is with everyone making a contribution.
[00:54:47] Teenager: Well, yeah, I need a little bit of help. Okay, well, because I want it, I want the screen to be white, not black.
[00:54:55] Seymour Papert: And the great thing about the computer is that it can bring together in one experience. The aesthetic, the personal, the bodily, the analytic, the mathematical, the abstract, all these things happen in one combined integrated experience.
The child making stuff on that screen is following an aesthetic, is doing something socially and culturally meaningful and personally involved as well as mathematically rich. These are not separated. It’s not as if the computer now does one thing and now does the other. Like real life situations, like the baby’s relationship to the toys or to the mother.
It has all these dimensions integrated into one experience and this is where it leads to a fundamental change and. The nature of the learning.