Mindstorms
Seymour Papert’s ideas about using computers to “turn every child into an epistemologist” were exciting! He said that essentially, by having children program computers- instead of having computers basically program them- children become not just active learners, but “active builders of their own intellectual structures.” By ‘teaching’ a computer how to think, they better understand their own minds. At first I wasn’t sure exactly how this would work. Fortunately, Papert’s illustration (of ordering and pairing beads as a metaphor for programming a computer) was perfect. It actually seems counterintuitive to say that doing something more abstract, like programming a computer, could help a child with more visual, concrete tasks such as findind every colored pair of beads with no repetitions. Wouldn’t…learning to make bead families help a child learn to program, not vice versa? It sounds like Papert wants to teach children to run before they walk. Not that I know anything about childhood education…it just seems strange.
The part of Papert’s thesis that I did applaud, however, was his idea that learning to program, “is learning to become highly skilled at isolating and correcting ‘bugs,’…The question to ask about the program is not whether is is right or wrong, but if it is fixable” (416). After being educated in the way that Papert suggests, children would, it seems, be more innovative and aggressive in their problem solving. It “changes out notion of a black and white version of success and failure,” (416) he says. Kids would learn not to immediately give up when they were ‘wrong,’ but to seek out new solutions. This is a very important idea to communicate to kids, because I would say that feeling like losers after getting the “wrong” answer is a problem that haunts all students, even college kids.