Seymour Papert





Seymour Papert died 7/31/2016 at the age of 88. See https://www.media.mit.edu/people/in-memory/papert. Quoting from the Website mentioned above:


 * Seymour Papert, whose ideas and inventions transformed how millions of children around the world create and learn, died Sunday, July 31, 2016 at his home in East Blue Hill, Maine. He was 88.


 * Papert’s career traversed a trio of influential movements: child development, artificial intelligence, and educational technologies. Based on his insights into children’s thinking and learning, Papert recognized that computers could be used not just to deliver information and instruction, but also to empower children to experiment, explore, and express themselves. The central tenet of his Constructionist theory of learning is that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world. As early as 1968, Papert introduced the idea that computer programming and debugging can provide children a way to think about their own thinking and learn about their own learning.


 * “With a mind of extraordinary range and creativity, Seymour Papert helped revolutionize at least three fields, from the study of how children make sense of the world, to the development of artificial intelligence, to the rich intersection of technology and learning,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “The stamp he left on MIT is profound. Today, as MIT continues to expand its reach and deepen its work in digital learning, I am particularly grateful for Seymour’s groundbreaking vision, and we hope to build on his ideas to open doors to learners of all ages, around the world.”


 * Papert’s life straddled several continents. He was born in 1928 in Pretoria, South Africa, and went on to study at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, where he earned a BA in philosophy in 1949, followed by a PhD in mathematics three years later. He was a leading anti-apartheid activist throughout his university years.


 * Papert’s studies then took him overseas–first to Cambridge University in England from 1954-1958, where he focused on math research, earning his second PhD, then to the University of Geneva, where he worked with Swiss philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget, whose theories about the ways children make sense of the world changed Papert’s view of children and learning.


 * From Switzerland, Papert came to the US, joining MIT as a research associate in 1963. Four years later, he became a professor of applied mathematics, and shortly after was appointed co-director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab (which later evolved into the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL) by its founding director Professor Marvin Minsky. Together, they wrote the 1969 book, Perceptrons, which marked a turning point in the field of artificial intelligence.


 * In 1985, Papert and Minsky joined former MIT President Jerome Wiesner and MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte to become founding faculty members of the MIT Media Lab, where Papert led the Epistemology and Learning research group.


 * “Seymour often talked poetically, sometimes in riddles, like his famed phrase, ‘you cannot think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something,’” says Professor Nicholas Negroponte, the Media Lab’s co-founder and first director. “He did not follow rules or run by anybody else’s clock. I would say, in Papertian style, Seymour never needed to do what he said because when he said what he did, it was better.”


 * Papert was among the first to recognize the revolutionary potential of computers in education. In the late 1960s, at a time when computers still cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Papert came up with the idea for Logo, the first programming language for children. Children used Logo to program the movements of a “turtle”–either in the form of a small mechanical robot or a graphic object on the computer screen. In his seminal book Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas (1980), Papert argued against “the computer being used to program the child.” He presented an alternative approach in which “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.”


 * In collaboration with Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, Papert explored how childhood objects have a deep influence on how and what children learn. In Mindstorms, Papert explained how he “fell in love with gears” as a child, and how he hoped to “turn computers into instruments flexible enough so that many children can each create for themselves something like what the gears were for me.”


 * Papert was the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Education at MIT from 1974-1981. In 1985, he began a long and productive collaboration with the LEGO company, one of the first and largest corporate sponsors of the Media Lab. Papert’s ideas served as an inspiration for the LEGO Mindstorms robotics kit, which was named after his 1980 book. In 1989, the LEGO company endowed a chair at the Media Lab, and Papert became the first LEGO Professor of Learning Research. In 1998, after Papert became professor emeritus, the name of the professorship was modified, in his honor, to the LEGO Papert Professorship of Learning Research. The professorship was passed on to Papert’s former student and long-time collaborator, Mitchel Resnick, who continues to hold the chair today.


 * “For so many of us, Seymour fundamentally changed the way we think about learning, the way we think about children, and the way we think about technology,” says Resnick, who heads the Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten research group.


 * In the late 1990s, Papert moved to Maine and continued his work with young people there, establishing the Learning Barn and the Seymour Papert Institute in 1999. He also set up a Learning Lab at the Maine Youth Center, where he worked to engage and inspire troubled youths who had received little support at home or school, and were grappling with drugs, alcohol, anger, or psychological problems. He was also integral to a Maine initiative requiring laptops for all 7th and 8th graders. Following the Maine initiative, Papert joined Negroponte and Alan Kay in 2004 to create the non-profit One Laptop per Child (OLPC), which produced and distributed low-cost, low-power, rugged laptops to the world’s poorest children. The organization produced more than three million laptops, reaching children in more than 40 countries. “Each of the laptops has Seymour inside,” says Negroponte.


 * Papert’s work inspired generations of educators and researchers around the world. He received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship in 1980, a Marconi International fellowship in 1981, and the Smithsonian Award from Computerworld in 1997. In 2001, Newsweek named him “one of the nation’s 10 top innovators in education.”


 * “Papert made everyone around him smarter–from children to colleagues–by encouraging people to focus on the big picture and zero in on the powerful ideas,” says CSAIL’s Patrick Winston, who took over as director of the AI Lab in 1972.


 * In addition to Mindstorms, Papert was the author of The Children’s Machine (1993) and The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap (1996). As an emeritus professor, Papert continued to write many articles and advise governments around the world on technology-based education. In 2006, while in Vietnam for a conference on mathematics education, he suffered a serious brain injury when struck by a motor scooter in Hanoi.


 * Papert is survived by his wife of 24 years, Suzanne Massie, a Russia scholar, with whom he collaborated on the Learning Barn and many international projects; his daughter, Artemis Papert; three stepchildren, Robert Massie IV, Susanna Massie Thomas, and Elizabeth Massie; and two siblings, Alan Papert and Joan Papert. He was previously married to Dona Strauss, Androula Christofides Henriques, and Sherry Turkle.


 * The Media Lab will host a celebration of the life and work of Seymour Papert in the coming months.

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A 2014 TEDx Talk About Seymour Papert
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-dFTmdX1kU#t=555. This Tale by Gary Stager provides an excellent introduction to Papert's lifetime of work and leadership in the field of computers in education.

A Website Titled Daily Papert Produced by Gary Stager
See http://dailypapert.com/?p=1318. Scroll down the right side to see a listing of topics available.

History of Logo
Quoting from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%29#History

Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Daniel G. Bobrow, Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon. Today the language is remembered mainly for its use of "turtle graphics", in which commands for movement and drawing produced line graphics either on screen or with a small robot called a "turtle". The language was originally conceived to teach concepts of programming related to LISP and only later to enable what Papert called "body-syntonic reasoning" where students could understand (and predict and reason about) the turtle's motion by imagining what they would do if they were the turtle. There are substantial differences between the many dialects of Logo, and the situation is confused by the regular appearance of turtle graphics programs that mistakenly call themselves Logo.

Logo was created in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), a Cambridge, Massachusetts research firm, by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert.[3] Its intellectual roots are in artificial intelligence, mathematical logic and developmental psychology. The first four years of Logo research, development and teaching work was done at BBN. The first implementation of Logo, called Ghost, was written in LISP on a PDP-1. The goal was to create a math land where kids could play with words and sentences.[4] Modeled on LISP, the design goals of Logo included accessible power[clarification needed] and informative error messages. The use of virtual Turtles allowed for immediate visual feedback and debugging of graphic programming.

The first working Logo turtle robot was created in 1969. A display turtle preceded the physical floor turtle. Modern Logo has not changed too much from the basic concepts before the first turtle. The first turtle was a tethered floor roamer, not radio-controlled or wireless. At BBN Paul Wexelblat developed a turtle named Irving that had touch sensors and could move forwards, backwards, rotate, and ding its bell. The earliest year-long school users of Logo were in 1968-69 at Muzzey Jr High, Lexington MA. The virtual and physical turtles were first used by fifth graders at the Bridge School in Lexington, MA in 1970-71.

About Seymour Papert
Quoting from http://www.papert.org/
 * People laughed at Seymour Papert in the 1960s when he talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity. The idea of an inexpensive personal computer was then science fiction. But Papert was conducting serious research in his capacity as a professor at MIT. This research led to many firsts. It was in his laboratory that children first had the chance to use the computer to write and to make graphics. The Logo programming language was created there, as were the first children's toys with built-in computation. The Logo Foundation was created to inform people about Logo and to support them in their use of Logo-based software for learning and teaching.


 * Today Papert is considered the world's foremost expert on how technology can provide new ways to learn. He has carried out educational projects on every continent, some of them in remote villages in developing countries. He is a participant in developing the most influential cutting-edge opportunities for children to participate in the digital world. He serves on the advisory boards for MaMaMedia Inc. (whose founder, Idit Harel, was once a doctoral student of his at MIT) and of the LEGO Mindstorms product line (which was named after Papert's seminal book Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas).


 * Papert lives in Maine, where he has founded a small laboratory called the Learning Barn to develop methods of learning that are too far ahead of the times for large-scale implementation. He has been named distinguished professor by the University of Maine and is credited with inspiring the first initiative aimed at giving a personal computer to every student of a state. He spends a large part of his time working in the Maine Youth Center in Portland, the state's facility for teenagers convicted of serious offenses.

Quoting from a November 2007 paper about a project at Harvard: Developing Minds with Digital Media:


 * This paper also does not address how computer interfaces in a broader sense can function as prosthetic extensions of brain power impacting human cognition. The work of neurologist Antonio Battro, educator Seymour Papert and others has demonstrated the computer’s ability to extend brain function, allowing deaf children to ‘hear’ music, children who’d undergone radical brain surgery to cultivate surprising skills, and children with cerebral palsy to communicate with the outside world. The work of these pioneers in the field of brain/computer interface shows how computers can dramatically alter brain functioning and facilitate communication, but these stories tell us less about the typical young person’s experience. Our focus here is on how the NDM impact on cognition by way of affecting habits of mind, or how we think. [Bold added for emphasis.]

Comment by David Moursund 1/6/2009
Recently I have been reading about Alan Kay's contributions to the field of ICT in education. I have also viewed a number of videos of his presentations.

Over and over again Alan Kay mentions a 1968 meeting he had with Seymour Papert. He tends to represent this as a life-changing experience. As a consequence of this meeting, Alan came to view computers as a media especially suited to the education of children. He picked up on the idea of children needing to learn challenging and powerful ideas, and that tough love and hard work are essential to this task.

Comment by Dave Moursund 1/18/08
I have known about Seymour Papert for many many years, and I have actually known him for quite a few years. I have seen him present at a number of conferences and I have occasionally "shared the stage" with him in presentations. I have read his books and a number of his articles. I feel humbled by his work!

A time that I vividly remember was after he had recently returned from India and I got to see him do a great presentation that included the metaphor of pencil-assisted instruction. During that part of his talk, he waved a pencil in the air, and it was a dynamic and inspiring presentation. However, a question came from the a member of the audience pointing out that many of the villages in India didn't even have a pencil—so how could one expect to provide them with computers?

That was many years ago, and India and many other parts of the world have changed greatly. Seymour is one of the people involved in the "$100 Laptop" project, and computer technology has made a major contribution to India's economy in the past decade.

Logo: The Dream is Still Alive
This is a 1988 Editorial written by David Moursund and published in The Computing Teacher.


 * Moursund, D.G. (May 1988). Logo: The Dream is Still Alive. The Computing Teacher. International Council for Computers in Education.

This is the third "Editor's Message" that I have written about Logo. It is motivated by three relatively recent Logo-related events that have affected me.

First, this past summer ICCE acquired the Logo Exchange and installed it as the publication of SIGLogo. This represents a serious financial commitment on ICCE's part. It is a major extension of ICCE's previous Logo-related activity of publishing Logo books and carrying a Logo column in The Computing Teacher.

Second, my recently increased interest in problem solving has extended in the Logo direction. Sharon Burrowes Yoder (editor of the Logo Exchange) and I are currently writing a series of articles on Logo and problem solving that will appear in the Logo Exchange. We focus on using Logo as a vehicle to help students learn general ideas about problem solving, and on helping students transfer this knowledge to domains outside of the Logo environment.

Third, I recently had the opportunity to spend quite a bit of time talking with Seymour Papert and to attend several of his presentations at a conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. This was a most enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Initial work on Logo began about 20 years ago. This was several years before Art Luehrmann coined the phrase computer literacy and educators began to talk about helping all students become computer literate. The basic ideas underlying Logo, both 20 years ago and now, have little to do with computer literacy. The focus is not on the computer. Rather, the goal is to help create a rich, exploratory learning environment that empowers the learner. Twenty years ago Seymour Papert had a vision that computers would eventually prove very powerful and cost effective in helping to create such environments.

But a lot has happened in the computer field during the past 20 years. For example, microcomputers with graphics and sound have become available. Applications software, such as word processors and spreadsheets, has come into general use. Many millions of people now have computers in their homes, and perhaps a quarter of the adult workforce in the United States regularly uses computers. It is reasonable to ask whether such changes have obviated the need for or the value of Logo.

In responding to such questions, it is important to be aware that Logo is a living, growing, ever changing language and an aid to creating good learning environments. Original Logo versions lacked Turtle graphics and ran in timeshared environments on mainframe computer systems with output to relatively slow printers. Logo with graphics, sound, and color are all more modern developments. Still more modern are LogoWriter and LEGO TC logo. In the future we may well see Logo versions that include built-in database and telecommunications capabilities.

The trend is clear. The Logo goal is to make use of computer technology to help create learning environments that engage the minds of children in rich, exploratory, open ended enquiries. Progress in understanding how to accomplish these tasks depends on field-based research, and such research has continued throughout the history of Logo. Progress in hardware capability and in software methodology has supported the development of new and better versions of Logo. The decreasing cost of hardware, the increasing availability of teacher and student support materials, and the growing understanding of staff development and how to support teachers using Logo with their students have all contributed to the potential of Logo.

It is easy to understand why Logo has so many dedicated supporters and will continue to thrive. All educators want to help children learn and develop their potentials. All educators recognize the value of having rich learning environments consisting of varied combinations of teachers, books, audiovisual materials, hands-on materials such as math manipulatives and artist supplies, and so forth. Computers can help create rich learning environments, and Logo represents one major approach to doing this.

The Logo dream is still alive, and in a few places the dream is slowly becoming a reality. Seymour Papert suggests that significant effects become clearly visible when students have easy access to a Logo environment for an hour a day. Research by Papert and others at the Hennigan School in Boston supports this position. Significant changes are noted in many children who have that daily hour of computer access for Logo-related activities.

One standard question is whether time taken away from the conventional curriculum will lead to decreased test scores. Researchers at the Hennigan School feared that this might happen, but it didn't. This suggests that an hour a day can be taken from the regular elementary school schedule with no ill effects on conventional school goals. The net effect of the conventional curriculum plus the Logo intervention is proving quite positive at the Hennigan School.

I feel that the work of Papert and others in the Logo field should be an inspiration to all of us. Computers are not a quick fix for what ails our educational system. But we are making continued and cumulative progress in the use of computers in education. Eventually computers will contribute substantially to some of the major changes needed in our educational system.

End of Editorial.

Follow-up to the Logo article.
On 7/6/08 I did a Google search to see if Logo is still an important part of the Hennigan School program of study. I concluded that computer use at Hennigan School is alive and well, but use of Logo may have shrunk substantially or disappeared. The school has computer labs and is tied in with a number of powerful partners such as TERC. Quoting from a 2007 document describing the school' program of study:


 * Our Math Leadership Team assists all teachers in implementing TERC Investigations 2 curriculum. [Editor's note. This is a math curriculum.] Computer technology develops computer literacy and supports classroom instruction.

Logo-oriented historians will want to read the article, Being Digital Learners, by Lars Kongshem. Quoting from this 1996 article:


 * At the Hennigan School, unspoken assumptions about the use of computers in education have been turned upside down. Here, computers don't regurgitate answers; they're used to formulate questions. Inside, you won't find kids on the receiving end of automated drill-and-practice programs or glitzy "edutainment" software. Instead, students use personal computers much like carpenters use hammers -- as tools to construct authentic, personal, and meaningful projects.


 * What does that look like? Taking a seat in front of one of the 72 networked IBM PS/2 computers arranged cluster-fashion in a common area in the school, fifth-grader Nebiyu Elias proudly fires up one of his inventions: a grand tour of the solar system. He's written a computer program that allows users to navigate an on-screen spaceship from one planet to the next with the keyboard's cursor keys. The program rewards successful arrival at each port of call by displaying interesting facts about the planet and then launching the ship into space with an eye-catching animation sequence. Nebiyu wrote this interactive adventure in Logo -- a programming language for kids -- over a period of three months.


 * Nebiyu is smart, but his sophisticated computer program is typical of the work kids at this school are doing. In fact, says Hennigan teacher Joanne Ronkin, when the kids sit down in front of a computer and start programming, "you can't tell who's the smartest child and who [has] special needs. It's a great equalizer."


 * Four computer periods per week is the norm at Hennigan. On this particular day, some of the fifth-graders are working on a long-term assignment to create educational computer games for third-graders. The fifth-graders choose topics such as multiplication or spelling, and as their programs take shape, the third-graders try out the games and offer their feedback. These homemade games tend to be much more popular among the kids than commercial ones, Ronkin says.

Author or Authors
Initial work on this Page was done by David Moursund.