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Seymour Papert
Personal blog · papert.org/articlesotherphilosophy
Seymour Papert's personal blog at papert.org covers philosophy. Since 2008, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 55 times, most often “Seymour Papert's Essays on Computers and Education”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (26) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link papert.org for Seymour Papert's writings on learning, constructionism and Logo. Commenters point to Mindstorms and the essay Gears of My Childhood as starting points.
- Recommended for · 10 comments
- Called accessible and brilliant; Mindstorms a must-read; Gears essay and works list recommended as starting points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 26 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Seymour Papert's Essays on Computers and Education5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2009-06-19
- /5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2010-06-29
- Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete (1990)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-11-26
- A Critique of Technocentrism in Thinking About the School of the Future3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-09-15
- /articles/GearsOfMyChildhood.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-07-08
- Hard Fun3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-06-19
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-05-03
- Situating Constructionism3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2008-11-04
- Seymour Papert and Paolo Freire: The Future of School (1980)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-08-01
- Papert's Principle2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-08-01
What Hacker News says?
Seymour Papert writes in the introduction Mindstorms about he was fascinated by gears as a child and spent much time playing with them, and what he learnt through play provided a valuable intellectual foundation for learning many elementary and advanced ideas in mathematics. http://www.papert.org/articles/GearsOfMyChildhood.html
Comment linking /articles/GearsOfMyChildhood.html
on “Gears”Submitted Computer as condom as a story · 31 points
HN discussionYou can find some of his work at: http://www.papert.org/ and more background info on him on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert
Comment linking /
on “Seymour Papert has died”Submitted Why School Reform Is Impossible as a story · 19 points
HN discussionThanks for the commentary togelius [1, 2] and deepnet [above]. Anyone interested in adding a soupçon of scholarship to Seth's project? Words do mean different things to different people, in different contexts.. There is a recent body of literature that explores the modern "maker" [3] movement. However, "maker" as a term may not have been a good fit for the OP's argument [1], which contrasted (academic) researchers w…
Comment linking /articles/EpistemologicalPluralism.html
on “The differences between tinkering and research (2016)”Submitted Computer as Condom as a story · 12 points
HN discussion> People laughed at Seymour Papert in the 1960s, more than half a century ago, when he vividly talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity, innovation, and "concretizing" computational thinking. [1] [1] http://papert.org/
Comment linking /
on “Programming as a Way of Thinking”Submitted Works by Seymour Papert, Ph.D as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWorking link http://www.papert.org/ Alan Kay on kids... Children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century. - Alan Kay (2016) Television is the last technology we should be allowed to invent without a Surgeon General's warning on it. - Alan Kay With a good programming language and interface, one - even children - can create from scratch important simulations…
Comment linking /
on “Explaining Programming to Six-Year-Olds”Submitted A Critique of Technocentrism in Thinking About the School of the Future as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf you find this kind of stuff interesting/challenging, you might want to read some stuff from Seymour Papert who dedicated large portion of his life to figuring exactly this: how to teach kids to program. His definition of "programming" was a bit broader, though. http://papert.org/
Comment linking /
on “Explaining Programming to Six-Year-Olds”Submitted Situating Constructionism as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAs a Finn, I restrain myself comparing us to others but I just want to say that most schools here are not well suited for non-superficial learning. I would hope the future brings a system that is driven by the need of individual pupil and by her potential and interests rather than giving equivalent, non-inspiring curriculum for all. Also, learning should have more meaningfulness in it; something along the lines of w…
Comment linking /
on “Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).”Submitted Seymour Papert's Essays on Computers and Education as a story · 3 points
HN discussionTry looking at the constructionist articles, specially Papert's works, as there are a lot of them online[1]. Basically, the idea is that you can introduce deep mathematical concepts very early by adopting a more intuitive media. Also, take a look at McLuhan[2] to understand how the media shapes the message if you really want to go deep into it. [1] http://www.papert.org/works.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma…
Comment linking /works.html
on “Calculus distilled into hours”Submitted The Gears of My Childhood as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAs a life-long programmer, I've also wondered often about how we express human thought and ideas in(to) software. The process is lossy, as you put it, in that so much is lost in translation. On the other hand, it's also "enriching" in that software can (or must) define the concrete details of models and logic that were missing in the source (human thought). > ..another way to express a higher level thought other tha…
Comment linking /
on “Programming as Theory Building (1985)”Submitted A Critique of Technocentrism in Thinking About the School of the Future as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou might enjoy reading Papert's "Gears of my childhood" for a better perspective on his attitude towards learning as a process of discovery http://www.papert.org/articles/GearsOfMyChildhood.html
Comment linking /articles/GearsOfMyChildhood.html
on “Why should children program? A review of Seymour Papert's Mindstorms”Submitted An Exploration in the Space of Mathematics Educations as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat's great to hear. Overal I love the concept but worry about your marketing. The Bloomberg stunt was clever and fun, but placing the words 'code' and 'easy' side-by-side can lead to frustration on the back-end of your proposition. Coding is hard. Hard-Fun [1]. And that's OK. [1] http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
Comment linking /articles/HardFun.html
on “Codecademy closes $10M round”Submitted Papert's Principle as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYes -- it sounds like some sewage treatment plants, industrial-scale recycling programs, maybe underground farms in the cool Earth powered by solar PV using LED lights, agricultural robots, improved discussion systems to route around corruption over land use planning, and so on would make the Nile valley into a happy place again (assuming equitable distribution of the resulting prosperity -- a big assumption). And i…
Comment linking /articles/HardFun.html
on “Death of the Nile”Submitted Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete (1990) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSeymour Papert ( http://www.papert.org/ ), inventor of Logo in his seminal work Mindstorms (1980) did a very good job on analyzing this phenomena. Not only he did a great analysis on children but also came up with Logo, one of the best paradigm-changing environments for teaching math. On his second book, The Children's Machine (1991), almost 11 years later he went deeper into the issue of computer's at schools and w…
Comment linking /articles/AnExplorationintheSpaceofMathematicsEducations.html
on “"I can't do math" (2001)”- lx · 2016-08-27
Submitted Seymour Papert and Paolo Freire: The Future of School (1980) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion If you want an advice, read Seymour Papert's articles and books ( http://www.papert.org/works.html , also take a look at http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget... ) Papert's style is very accessible, and he was, at least in my view (and in Piaget's view) the guy who grok his ideas the most.
Comment linking /works.html
on “Alan Kay’s reading list”Submitted Educational Computing: How Are We Doing? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionVery interesting list of links. This is such a good topic for popularization because of its visual and concrete aspects. (e.g. Papert and Turkle's idea of the "revaluation of the concrete" http://www.papert.org/articles/EpistemologicalPluralism.html ). (Drawing is always concrete, I guess, not just because it's a hand-eye coordination thing, but because of its particularity.) FWIW The most general wikipedia article…
Comment linking /articles/EpistemologicalPluralism.html
on “The woman who could 'draw' music”Submitted Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
