In early August 1981 sixty people, from publishing houses, computer centres and public schools across New York and from a farm in Iowa, arrived for a two-week workshop called “Computer: A Language for Learning”. Creative Computing’s Richard Eyster described its leader, Seymour Papert, as “the twinkling, bearded prophet from M.I.T.” Papert lectured for two hours every day, on subjects “ranging from the meaning of Piaget to the international impact of computerization”, and had daily trouble keeping his microphone attached. Even then, before prices had fallen far, he argued for one microcomputer per child.
Papert was a mathematician who had turned to how children learn. He was one of the creators of the Logo programming language and its turtle, and in Mindstorms (1980) he made the case that children could learn by programming computers, not by being drilled by them. Through the 1980s computer magazines on both sides of the Atlantic interviewed him and reported his talks.
Fast facts
- Born: 1928, Pretoria, South Africa.
- Died: 31 July 2016, East Blue Hill, Maine, aged 88.
- Education: University of the Witwatersrand (BA 1949, PhD in mathematics 1952); a second PhD at Cambridge.
- MIT: research associate from 1963; professor of applied mathematics from 1967; co-director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Marvin Minsky; founding faculty member of the Media Lab in 1985.
- Logo: created at Bolt Beranek and Newman with Wally Feurzeig and Cynthia Solomon, in 1967 or 1968 depending on the source; developed through the 1970s by his Logo Group at MIT.
- Books: Perceptrons (1969, with Minsky); Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas (1980).
From Pretoria to Geneva and MIT
Papert grew up in South Africa and studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, where MIT’s obituary records a BA in philosophy in 1949 and a PhD in mathematics three years later. He took part in the student movement against apartheid. He then went to Cambridge, where he earned a second PhD, and on to the University of Geneva, where he worked with the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, whose theories of how children make sense of the world changed his own view of learning.
He joined MIT as a research associate in 1963 and became a professor of applied mathematics four years later. Marvin Minsky, the founding director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, made him its co-director. Together they wrote Perceptrons (1969), a mathematical study of the limits of simple neural networks.
Logo
Logo was not Papert’s alone. It began at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), a research firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Wally Feurzeig led the team and Papert and Cynthia Solomon worked with him. The Logo Foundation dates the first version to 1967. Harold Abelson’s TI Logo (1984) says it “was initially developed in 1968 as part of a National Science Foundation sponsored research project conducted at Bolt, Beranek & Newman”. Through the 1970s Papert’s Logo Group at MIT took it on, worked with hundreds of children, and put the turtle, first a floor robot and then a triangle on a screen, at its centre.
Abelson summed up the aim as “an educational tool with no threshold and no ceiling”. Mitchel Resnick, Papert’s former student, later restated it in the paper introducing Scratch: “Papert argued that programming languages should have a ‘low floor’ (easy to get started) and a ‘high ceiling’”. Resnick’s group added “wide walls” of its own, for the range of different projects a language should support.
Mindstorms
Basic Books published Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas in 1980, a 230-page hardback at $12.95. 80 Microcomputing’s reviewer called it “a revolutionary book about what can and might be done with computers in the field of education”, one that “bears little relation to the drill applications that proliferate in computer aided instruction”. It set out the debt to Piaget directly: “I take from Piaget a model of children as builders of their own intellectual structures.” The computer, in Papert’s argument, could supply the materials that made abstract ideas concrete. By 1984 Sinclair User called the book “the Bible of Logo enthusiasts”.
MIT later summed up his thinking as constructionism, whose central tenet is “that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world”.
A computer for every child
Home computers brought Logo out of the laboratory, and Papert went with it. He worked with Texas Instruments and Apple on their versions, and with Logo Computer Systems Inc., in Quebec, on commercial Logos. In February 1984 he told Family Computing that computers were more than pencils, but should be handed out like them: “If you want to teach children to write, you give them each a pencil.” He would rather see “100 computers in one percent of the schools, than one computer in 100 percent of the schools”, and he was launching a campaign under the slogan “A computer for every child by 1986”.
He was frank about the trade-offs. “I have a huge conflict with Logo,” he said. “I’d like to give it away. But unless a gold mine is found, we’d have no money to support new development.” Logo’s success had taken him by surprise: he had expected it to trickle down slowly from academics to schools, but “the teachers and students have been pushing for it”.
In September 1984 he gave the presidential address to the British Logo Users Group’s conference at Loughborough University. Sinclair User’s Theo Wood found him “a very witty and amusing speaker” and “a somewhat blunt” one, and reported his case for sprites: motion is everywhere in our lives, but Newton’s laws of motion are hard to reach, and sprites could let children explore movement the way the turtle let them explore geometry. Not every delegate agreed. Yuri Leon, from Haifa, pleaded for moderation in the claims made for Logo, warning that they could backfire.
At the Logo 84 conference in Boston that year, reported in COMPUTE! by David Thornburg, he singled out The Learning Company’s Rocky’s Boots. The idea it taught, that any computing device can be built from logic elements, was “surely one of the most powerful ideas of all time”, he said, but hardly any of its users came away able to use that idea outside the program. The turtle, by contrast, had “a cultural resonance with the outside world”. He imagined a future of “10 to 30 microworlds of which the turtle world is but one example”.
The Media Lab and after
In 1985 Papert and Minsky joined Jerome Wiesner and Nicholas Negroponte as founding faculty members of the MIT Media Lab, where Papert led the Epistemology and Learning research group. LEGO/Logo, developed at the Media Lab, let children program motors and sensors built from LEGO bricks. LEGO endowed a chair at the Media Lab in 1989, and Papert was its first holder. When he became professor emeritus in 1998 it was renamed the LEGO Papert Professorship of Learning Research. It later passed to Resnick. LEGO named its Mindstorms robot kits after his book.
Later he joined Negroponte and Alan Kay in creating the non-profit One Laptop per Child. “Each of the laptops has Seymour inside,” Negroponte said. In 2006, at a conference on mathematics education in Hanoi, Papert was struck by a motor scooter and suffered a serious brain injury. He died at his home in East Blue Hill, Maine, on 31 July 2016, aged 88.
Sources
- Richard H. Eyster, “Seymour Papert and the Logo Universe”, Creative Computing, vol. 7 no. 12, December 1981, p. 70 onwards: the New York workshop.
- Chris Brown, review of Mindstorms, 80 Microcomputing issue 14, February 1981, p. 14: publisher, length, price and the Piaget quotation.
- Harold Abelson, TI Logo (McGraw-Hill, 1984): “no threshold and no ceiling” (p. vii) and Logo’s origin at BBN in 1968 (p. viii).
- Logo Foundation, “Logo History”, https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/history.html (web, secondary): the first version at BBN in 1967, and LEGO/Logo at the Media Lab.
- Mitchel Resnick, John Maloney and others, “Scratch: Programming for All”, Communications of the ACM 52(11), November 2009 (modern article): low floor, high ceiling and wide walls.
- Nick Sullivan, interview with Seymour Papert, Family Computing, vol. 2 no. 2, February 1984, pp. 70–71: the Logo Group, LCSI, pencils, the 1986 campaign and his conflict over giving Logo away.
- Theo Wood, report on the British Logo Users Group conference, Sinclair User issue 32, November 1984: the Loughborough address and Mindstorms as “the Bible of Logo enthusiasts”.
- David Thornburg, COMPUTE!, October 1984, pp. 153–155: Papert’s remarks on Rocky’s Boots and microworlds at Logo 84.
- Harry Henderson, Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, revised edition (Facts On File, 2009), pp. 359–360: his date and place of birth, Witwatersrand, anti-apartheid activism and his years with Piaget.
- MIT News, “Seymour Papert, pioneer of constructionist learning, dies at 88”, 1 August 2016, https://news.mit.edu/2016/seymour-papert-pioneer-of-constructionist-learning-dies-0801 (web, secondary): his degrees, Geneva, his MIT posts, Perceptrons, the Media Lab, the LEGO professorship, Mindstorms kits, One Laptop per Child, the Hanoi accident and his death.