Reflecting on Papert: Week 5

This week in class, we continued reading Seymour Papert's book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas.  In chapter three, addressing how math is best learned and understood by children, Papert (1980) highlights the importance of learners having a "relationship to it" (p. 65), as well as a "personal need to do something one could not do before" (p. 74).  Learning driven by personal need, rather than the requirement to memorize and regurgitate, is learning that is more "powerful...general...intelligible" (p. 76). Computers, then, with their ability to help children internalize math concepts by applying theorems for the purpose of creating something they want to create, may help students learn how to learn, by allowing them to break larger problems into smaller chunks that might be applicable in their daily lives.  While this book is a seminal work, providing a historical context for Papert's philosophy of constructionism (a philosophy that has notably influenced the way I approach teaching and learning), I've found my mind wandering while wading through it in its entirety.

Wishing for a fresher take on how Papert's ideas play out in our media saturated world, I turned my attention to Connected Code:  Why Children Need to Learn Programming, which was published in paperback this past September.  While Kafai, Y. B. & Burke, Q.  (2016) actively build upon Papert, reinforcing key ideas that he advocates in a variety of publications, it goes further by making the case that coding and programming should be valued less as a form of "thinking and engaging in the individual mind" and more "as a form of participation and expression" (p. 127).  This assertion really jumped out, because it is supported by prior research I've done related to media literacy and the benefits of remixing.  Code is a building block of media that has the potential to influence people's thinking through their exposure to media messages, but it can also enable a citizen to construct and deconstruct their own media messages.  Code is also a building block of physical objects, the design of which are also human constructions, that may also reflect certain social and political values.  Not only does this book do an admirable job of articulating Papert's influences in education, using contemporary examples that are relevant in my life, it extends the conversation to some of the physical tools and materials that I find personally intriguing.

Works Cited

Kafai, Y. B. & Burke, Q.  (2016). Connected code: Why children need to learn programming.  

     Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press.

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. New York, NY: Basic Books.