This is a post to pay my teacherly respects to the great Seymour Papert, whose ideas and inventions transformed how millions of children around the world create and learn. Seymour died on Sunday, July 31, 2016 at his home in Maine, USA, aged 88. As I’ll explain, every classroom teacher today owes a debt to his work.
MIT’s website reads, “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 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 2002, Papert said, “The essence of Piaget was how much learning occurs without being planned or organized by teachers or colleges. His whole point was that children develop intellectually without being taught!”
Stanford University added “Papert’s work and advocacy was in using technology for curiosity, creativity and play in colleges. If a historian were to draw a line connecting Jean Piaget’s work on developmental psychology to today’s trends in educational technology, the line would simply be labeled “Papert.” And perhaps the most remarkable thing about that line would be the other points it intersects along its course of more than fifty years. Seymour Papert was at the center of three revolutions: child development, artificial intelligence and computational technologies for education.”
He was an inspirational force in research and in promoting the use of technology in learning and every teacher (and home) is today benefiting from his work, especially now as robotics, programming and other science-engineering technologies are receiving government attention in colleges – albeit 30 years later.
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