Stuff this week - Who in the world was Seymour Papert?
 Seymour Papert was a mathematician, computer scientist, and educator who sadly passed away on 1 August 2016 aged 88. Some would argue that his work has had the greatest ever impact on children’s learning with digital technologies.
In the pencil-and-paper world of the 1960s classroom, Dr. Papert envisioned a computing device on every desk and an internet like environment in which vast amounts of printed material would be available to children. He put his ideas into practice, creating in the late ’60s a computer programming language, called Logo, to teach children how to use computers.
Yet his vision was not the usual way computers are used by children today. Papert was inspired by his former colleague Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist whose study of child development has often been compared to Freud’s work in its influence on the science of human intelligence. Jean was known for his constructivist theories of education. Papert extended this theory of constructivism to formulate his own which he called constructionism. This is the way in which students can build knowledge by working with concrete materials rather than abstract propositions; that is, by creating artifacts they can share. Papert said:
“In this particular art class they were all carving soap, but what each student carved came from wherever fancy is bred, and the project was not done and dropped but continued for many weeks. It allowed time to think, to dream, to gaze, to get a new idea and try it and drop it or persist, time to talk, to see other people’s work and their reaction to yours — not unlike mathematics as it is for the mathematician, but quite unlike math as it is in school.”
Yet we still see the typical siloed by subject school timetables. The application to the real world is lacking and the opportunity for children to create is limited. One approach in education which attempts to solve this is Problem Based Learning (PBL). PBL is a constructionist method which allows students to learn about a subject by exposing them to multiple problems and asking them to construct their understanding of the subject through these problems.
What else can we do to embrace Seymour Papert’s ideas? Programming in Scratch, programming robots and exploring real world maths problems are three ways that are easily accessible. Anyone who has seen children engaged in solving these sorts of problems knows the value that they have for broader education.
So the ideas that Papert formulated back in the 60s are finally coming to the mainstream. We need to continue to think about ways in which our kids education can be enriched by following his lead. Watch this 2 minute video to see Seymour Papert talking about the classroom of the future in 1986. | 
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