Do you remember Professor Seymour Papert and his book Mindstorms? At a time when such things were expensive for adults, he put computers and a remote-control robotic turtle in kids classrooms. Armed with a simple robot programming language, these kids created amazing things and broke many educational paradigms. But have you heard anything of this recently?
Papert suggested, amongst other things, that many children are bored with school and bored with being talked down to by educators. Since this had been my experience through much of school up until university, the book struck a chord with me. It came out at a time when I was at a cross-roads in my life. I wasn’t very pleased with the formal education I had received and I spent a lot of time thinking about how we educate our children. Papert held out some hope that we might break a couple of important ruts I felt our education system had gotten into.
Papert also suggested that personal computers would become so inexpensive and ubuiquitous that little children would have them, and spend some time suggesting how we might best accomplish that. Personal computers were, at the time, only for geeks like me (I built one myself, from components) and were unknown by (and unusable for) the non-geek.
And then I heard nothing more about Papert, his LOGO turtles or any of that. For years.
Until 2 Christmases ago … when I stumbled across a WiFi robotic toy with vision, touch and sound sensors. Made by Lego, it’s their “Mindstorms” line. It’s amazing (and quite expensive for a child, which kind of misses the point). You can see it here: http://www.legomindstorms.com/ I nearly bought myself one, until my wife pointed out that the dog would probably pick a fight with it, and the dog would likely win.
It turns out, Papert hasn’t been idle all this time, just moving in circles that don’t touch me. He wrote a book called The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. You can read about it here: http://worldwideworkshop.org/programs/past-programs/connected-family/connected-family
When I went to kindergarden, I was 5. I could already read. My teachers were upset because they felt it was their place to teach me to read and my parents, not being trained educators, couldn’t do as good a job as they could. I can still read now, so my parents can’t have done all that bad a job.
My grandson is now 3 1/2. He uses a computer regularly to play various kinds of eye-hand co-ordination games. He can type on a special kids keyboard.He’s way more advanced than I was at 5 when I got to kindergarten and my parents received their reprimand.
My grandson will be 4 around next Christmas. Maybe he’ll be getting one of these under the tree. Or should I say “we”?
Some early clippings and pictures of the original LOGO turtles can be found here: http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=1711