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Happy Leap Birthday, Seymour Papert! (Plus resources!)
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Happy birthday to our great friend, colleague, mentor, and continuous source of inspiration, the late great Dr. Seymour Papert! Anyone who knew Seymour knows how being born on Leap Day is so characteristic of this special and unique genius. Papert was a prominent mathematician, anti-apartheid activist in his native South Africa, artificial intelligence pioneer, and the person Jean Piaget turned to when he wanted to understand how children construct mathematical understanding. Many consider him the father of educational computing. If you’ve used Scratch, Logo, robots, laptops, or programmable LEGO in your classroom, thank Seymour Papert. Gary first met Seymour in 1985 and worked with him for decades, most notably collaborating on Papert’s last institutional research project, the creation of a multiage, interdisciplinary, project-based, technology-rich, alternative learning environment inside a troubled prison for teens. A decade before folks began thinking about putting a maker space inside schools, Papert, Stager, and their colleagues made a makerspace that was school. Our summer institute, Constructing Modern Knowledge, is borne of conversations between Gary and Seymour about the need to create models of what progressive education might look like in a computationally rich context. Our popular book, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering, is a love letter to Papert’s vision and our recent publication, Twenty Things To Do with a Computer: Forward 50, convened four dozen leading thinkers from around the world to reflect and build upon the remarkable path Papert and CMK Senior Fellow Cynthia Solomon paved for computers in the classroom more than a half century ago. The Constructing Modern Knowledge Summer Institute is a living version of Papert’s vision for a contemporary creative learning environment. We hope you will join us this July 9-12th in Manchester, New Hampshire for our 15th CMK. In our work, every day is Seymour Papert day, but on this special occasion, we would like to share the following resources with you, your colleagues, and students.
· Seymour Papert was author of three seminal books on learning, teaching, and computing that are essential reading.
Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez |
Constructing Modern Knowledge
Join us for news, resources, and events for creative, progressive educators
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