“The fifth big idea is taking time – the proper time for the job. Many students at school get used to being told every five minutes or every hour: do this, then do that, now do the next thing. If someone isn’t telling them what to do they get bored. Life is not like that. […]
“The fourth big idea is learning to learn. Many students get the idea that “the only way to learn is by being taught.” This is what makes them fail in school and in life. Nobody can teach you everything you need to know. You have to take charge of your own learning.” Papert, S. (1999)
“The third big idea is hard fun. We learn best and we work best if we enjoy what we are doing. But fun and enjoying doesn’t mean “easy.” The best fun is hard fun. Our sports heroes work very hard at getting better at their sports. The most successful carpenter enjoys doing carpentry. The successful
“The second big idea is technology as building material. If you can use technology to make things you can make a lot more interesting things. And you can learn a lot more by making them. This is especially true of digital technology: computers of all sorts including the computer-controlled Lego in our Lab.” Papert, S.
In 1999, Seymour Papert embarked on his last ambitious institutional research project when he created the constructionist, technology-rich, project-based, multi-aged Constructionist Learning Laboratory inside of Maine’s troubled prison for teens, The Maine Youth Center. Shortly after the start of the three year project, Papert outlined the Eight Big Ideas behind the Constructionist Learning Laboratory. Although
“In my view, a key to the current trends of discussion about technology and education is an ironic fact about the imbalance between informational and constructional. Whereas the most qualitatively original contribution digital technology could make to education lies in redressing the imbalance, in fact the imbalance is increased by popular perception that so strongly
“What an individual can learn, and how he learns it, depends on what models he has available. This raises, recursively, the question of how he learned these models. Thus the “laws of learning” must be about how intellectual structures grow out of one another and about how, in the process, they acquire both logical and
“Once I was alerted to the concept of “hard fun” I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do. But they have to be the right things matched to
Papert has been criticized for taking video games seriously–and for soliciting a $3 million grant from Nintendo to develop learning tools that look and feel more like video games than schoolbooks. The three-year project ended last year, but Papert makes no apologies for it. “Change in education isn’t just going to come from ivory-tower academics,”
“Any adult who thinks one of these games is easy need only sit down and try to master one,” he writes. “Most are hard, with complex information–as well as technique–to be mastered.” Video games empower children “to test out ideas about working within prefixed rules and structures in a way few other toys are capable