Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Name: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas
Author: Seymour Papert

by Seymour Papert

Let the kid program the computer, not the reverse.

For you if

you think kids learn by making things, not by being handed answers.

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$20 MSRP · Paperback
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Papert studied with Piaget and then went to MIT to ask a blunt question: what if the computer programs the child less than the child programs the computer? His answer was Logo, a programming language in which a kid steers a turtle around the floor and learns geometry by making a mistake and fixing it. He called it constructionism: kids learn best by building things they care about. The book is the manifesto behind Scratch, makerspaces and a lot of Mitchel Resnick's work.

Where This Book Lives

Themes: childhood childhood independence community

Pass with note. Published 1980, so the technology is dated and the book's optimism about computers in schools has been tested hard by what actually happened; the argument about how kids learn holds up better than the hardware. Papert had no documented personal concerns that I could find. Availability flag: confirm an in-stock print edition at Bookshop.org. Direct tie to DoCR's 'plan the container, not the content' principle. Close relatives: Lifelong Kindergarten, The Having of Wonderful Ideas, Free to Learn and The Gardener and the Carpenter.

Same pattern, different era

Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.

Aké: The Years of Childhood

Wole Soyinka