Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas

by Seymour Papert

In many schools today, the phrase “computer-aided instruction” means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.

Difficulty with school math is often the first step of an invasive intellectual process that leads us all to define ourselves as bundles of aptitudes and ineptitudes, as being “mathematical” or “not mathematical,” “artistic” or “not artistic,” “musical” or “not musical,” “profound” or “superficial,” “intelligent” or “dumb.” Thus deficiency becomes identity and learning is transformed from the early child’s free exploration of the world to a chore beset by insecurities and self-imposed restrictions.

the classroom as an artificial and inefficient learning environment that society has been forced to invent because its informal environments fail in certain essential learning domains, such as writing or grammar or school math.

makes Piaget-in-the-schools a Piaget backward—backward because children are being force-fed “correct” theories before they are ready to invent them. And backward because Piaget’s work puts into question the idea that the “correct” theory is superior as a learning strategy.

Piaget observed that children develop coherent intellectual structures that seemed to correspond very closely to the Bourbaki mother structures.

If computers and programming become a part of the daily life of children, the conservation-combinatorial gap will surely close and could conceivably be reversed: Children may learn to be systematic before they learn to be quantitative!

Nice idea. did not go quite like that in hindsigh. Rather we are further from the goal in 2013 than 1970