Learning All The Time

by John C. Holt

This is exactly the point that Seymour Papert makes in Mindstorms. When children working with computers make "mistakes"--that is, get from their computer a result other than the one they wanted--they tend to say, if they are newly arrived from school, "it's all wrong," and they want to start over from the beginning. Papert encourages them to see that it's not all wrong, there's just one particular thing wrong. In computer tinge, there is a "bug" in their program and their task is to "de-bug" it--find the one false step, take it out, and replace it with the correct step.