The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child (Infrastructures)

by Morgan G. Ames

Papert’s constructionism borrows heavily from Jean Piaget’s theory of constructivism, as reflected in the confusing similarity between the two names. Before joining MIT in 1964, Papert spent five years at Piaget’s International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva, around the time that Piaget’s constructivist theories of child cognitive development—first articulated in the 1920s—started to gain popularity worldwide.7 Papert adopted from Piaget a focus on children’s learning as an active process of constructing knowledge about the world. Both stressed that children (and adults) learn by relating new concepts to what they already know and sometimes adjusting their theories of the world to accept new concepts. Piaget called this “assimilation” and “accommodation,” respectively, though Papert called both “Piagetian learning.”