Seymour Papert

Biography

        Seymour Papert, (born February 29, 1928, Pretoria, South Africa) South African-born mathematician and computer scientist who was best known for his contributions to the understanding of children’s learning processes and to the ways in which technology can support learning. He invented Logo, a computer-programming language that was an educational tool.

In 1952 Papert earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of the Witwatersrand. He then did mathematical research at the University of Cambridge, where he received another doctorate in 1958. Later that year he began working with psychologist Jean Piaget at the University of Geneva, studying the cognitive development of young children. Piaget adhered to constructivism—which asserted that learning arises from building mental models based on experience—and the theory became influential in Papert’s thinking about children and learning.

In 1963 Papert joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he taught until 1996, when he became professor emeritus. While at MIT, he co-wrote (with Marvin Minsky)Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry (1969), a seminal work about artificial intelligence (AI). Papert was also instrumental in the creation of the school’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1970; now the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), which had previously been part of Project MAC, and he later helped found the MIT Media Laboratory (1985).

Although Papert was influential in the fields of AI research and mathematics, his best-known work concerned children’s learning styles. He was highly critical of traditional educational thought, in which children were cast in the role of passive recipients of knowledge rather than active participants in activity-based, creative, non-structured learning exchanges. In addition, he criticized schools for their hierarchical organization, dependence on testing and learning by rote, commitment to uniformity, and valuing of information over knowledge. Instead, Papert developed an educational philosophy he referred to as “constructionism,” in that it focuses on the idea of mental construction. Children learn best, he argued, through tinkering, unstructured activities that resemble play, and research based on partial knowledge—by solving problems that are interesting to them, much as they do in non-school situations.

Believing that computers had the potential to revolutionize learning, in the late 1960s Papert invented the programming language Logo, which children could use to draw pictures, direct robot-like creatures, or engage in other learning activities. He later collaborated with the company LEGO on MINDSTORMS, a line of programmable toys in which customized LEGO bricks were embedded with tiny computers. The name was derived from Papert’s influential work Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980).

Papert’s other books include The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer(1993) and The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap (1996). He later taught at the University of Maine and was involved with a number of organizations, including One Laptop per Child.^[1]

 

Contributions to HCI

• In the mid 1960s Seymour Papert, a mathematician who had been working with Jean Piaget in Geneva, came to the United States where he co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Marvin Minsky. Papert worked with the team from Bolt, Beranek and Newman, led by Wallace Feurzeig, that created the first version of Logo in 1967.Throughout the 1970s Logo was incubating at MIT and a few other research sites: Edinburgh, Scotland and Tasmania, Australia. There were small research activities conducted in local schools, including the Brookline Public Schools, just up the Charles River from MIT. Dan Watt,Cynthia Solomon, and other MIT researchers documented their work with a small number of elementary school students using Logo. Their reports are among the several dozen Logo Memos published by MIT during this period.The Logo Programming Language, a dialect of Lisp, was designed as a tool for learning. Its features — modularity, extensibility, interactivity, and flexibility — follow from this goal.^[2]

 

• Constructionism as an educational theory is student-centered and emphasizes discovery learning, where students are encouraged to work with tangible objects in the real world and use what they already know to gain more knowledge. The point is to make the process of thinking and learning visible and to allow for a more process-oriented engagement with an idea via construction and deconstruction. Under constructionism, teachers take a backseat role as facilitators of student learning instead of giving lectures or step-by-step instruction.Seymour Papert, a leading constructionism advocate and researcher, is for bringing technology into classrooms as much as possible. Constructionism can mostly be found being used as an educational tool in science and math classrooms, though it is spreading to other subjects as well. Today, there is an increasing popularity for robotic technologies used in the classroom. Specifically, there has been a focus on “white-box” digital tools, which teach the user or builder about the structure of the technology itself, in contrast to “black-box” software or technology, which conceals the method of its creation and is closed to any modifications by the user or builder.^[3]