#Seymour papert logo programming language 1987 how to

Papert’s books included “The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer” (1993) and “The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap” (1996).Īccording to MIT, Papert was married to Dona Strauss, Androula Christofides Henriques and Sherry Turkle. Piaget showed me a way in which my caring for math, for the philosophy of thinking, and for social reform all seemed to go together.” “Before I met him, I had been intellectually torn between my interest in how people came to think and my interest in more abstract ideas. “Piaget brought many things together for me,” Papert told the publication Technology Review in 1987. He received a second doctorate from the University of Cambridge in England in the late 1950s before beginning his collaboration with Piaget. He received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and philosophy in 1949 and a doctorate in mathematics in 1952, both from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he joined the anti-apartheid movement. Seymour Aubrey Papert was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on Feb. We’ll start by putting one pencil in each classroom.’ The idea of one computer in each classroom is about as absurd as one pencil in each classroom.” “Imagine that writing had just been invented,” Papert told the Times, “and somebody said, ‘Let’s take it easy. Papert’s belief that computers should be everywhere.

More recently, he collaborated with Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, and Alan Kay, a computer scientist, on One Laptop per Child, a nonprofit initiative to distribute affordable laptops to children in developing countries. With Minsky, Papert wrote the 1969 volume “Perceptrons.”According to the MIT Press, it was “the first example of a mathematical analysis carried far enough to show the exact limitations of a class of computing machines that could seriously be considered as models of the brain.”

“Getting a computer to do something requires that the underlying process be described, on some level, with enough precision to be carried out by the machine,” he wrote.Īt MIT, Papert served as a director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab, now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, along with artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, who died in January.

#Seymour papert logo programming language 1987 how to

It “gives a child the possibility of exploring the power of the computer and mastery over it.”įurthermore, “an important part of becoming a good learner is learning how to push out the frontier of what we can express with words,” he wrote in his 1980 book “Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas.” “Logo is a program, which is to say it’s a way of making the computer do what you want it to do,” Papert told the New York Times in 1985. To parents and teachers who feared that computers would have a dulling effect on children’s minds, Papert argued that programs such as Logo would yield the opposite result. Papert compared the experience to learning French not by poring over a vocabulary book, but by living in France. By instructing the cursor, represented by a turtle, to move different distances in different directions, the children would absorb concepts of arithmetic and geometry. Papert was credited with playing a leading role in the development of Logo, a programming language that children could use to draw shapes on a monitor. “In that moment, was born – and, today, tens of thousands of students across Maine are better off because of it. ‘It is only when it is one-to-one that the power occurs.’ ‘No, no,’ he responded, holding up both index fingers. “At the time, as Governor, I had been thinking about how to increase the number of computers in classrooms and told him that, perhaps through some mighty effort, we might be able to increase the ratio of students to computers to three-to-one. King said in a statement released Monday. “Almost twenty years ago, I had a conversation with Seymour that opened my eyes to the importance of empowering students with technology,” Sen. Decades would pass before computer technology began to compete in schools with chalk and blackboards, pencils and paper.īut Papert was unstinting in his promotion of computer technology, which he said facilitated an active, or “constructionist,” style of learning, as he termed it, as opposed to the passive memorization of facts and tables. “Within a day or two it became an obsession – to get computers in the hands of kids.”Īt the time, Papert was a lonely evangelist for personal computers. “I was exhilarated by the tremendous power of problem solving that tool offered,” he told the Portland Press Herald of Maine in 1997.