One of the first people to recognize the educational potential of computers was Seymour Papert. Originally trained as a mathematician, Papert spent many years working with famed child psychologist Jean Piaget before moving to MIT, where he and Marvin Minsky cofounded the Artificial Intelligence Lab. From that perch, in 1970 Papert delivered a now-famous paper, “Teaching Children Thinking,” in which he argued that the best way for children to learn was not through “instruction,” but rather through “construction”—that is, learning through doing, especially when that doing involved a computer.
