Seymour Papert

Seymour Papert (2006)

Seymour Papert (born February 29, 1928 in Pretoria , South Africa , † July 31, 2016 in Blue Hill , Maine ) was an American mathematician and psychologist of South African origin. He was a professor of math and education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

Life

Born and raised in South Africa, Papert was actively involved in the local anti- apartheid movement. From 1954 to 1958 he studied mathematics at Cambridge University in Great Britain .

From 1958 to 1963 he worked closely with the educational scientist Jean Piaget at the University of Geneva in Switzerland . Papert was widely recognized as Piaget's most famous and successful student. Piaget once said: "Nobody understands my ideas as well as Papert."

From 1963 he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and together with Marvin Minsky founded the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT . Papert dealt intensively with the topic of children and computers and invented the programming language Logo in 1968 .

From the 1970s onwards he published a number of articles and books on education, learning, thinking, artificial intelligence and mathematics.

In 1985 he co-founded the MIT Media Lab with Nicholas Negroponte and ran the Media Arts and Science Program there .

Information technology and the "learning revolution"

Based on his research, Papert found that in the last few decades a radical change has taken place in almost all areas of society such as medicine, traffic and telecommunications, but this has not taken place in the school as an institution. The inclusion of new forms of communication and forms of cooperation are mostly not used in the classroom. The classic "frontal teaching" is still decisive.

The school system thus has "the tendency inherent in the system to make children dependent". Children are not helped when learning is simply giving the right answers at the right time. This procedure takes away the joy of learning.

A change in the school as an institution is therefore necessary. This change must be radical and creeping at the same time. It is radical because once the conversion process has been completed, in a before-now comparison, it will be found that methods and forms of didactics have changed extensively through the use of computer technology. But it is also creeping, as the process of change is only progressing very slowly due to social adaptation processes. "A radical change in a system can only take place through slow organic development and in close accordance with social development."

Papert was a proponent of the constructivist learning theory , so called for a school that requires the creative development of students and teachers in the context of lessons. The comprehensive integration of information and computer technology in the classroom is an ideal instrument for this creative development of knowledge. Thereby, a responsible use of technology should take place in the context of the teaching, which promotes the motivation of the students to learn and raises the level of education in the long term.

Papert coined the term constructionism , a learning theory that emphasizes active construction as an efficient learning method. This situated learning enables the scholar to be reconstructed and then to be constructed by the student himself. The learning is embedded in the situational context and enables a completely different, higher quality quality of learning.

The child should therefore be seen as the subject of his learning processes. This means that the children must be “age-appropriate, ie. H. Open up (according to Piaget) concrete, operative access possibilities to the new technologies, access possibilities that are not predetermined by the teacher towards a precisely defined goal, but that are to be conquered and developed by the children within the framework of self-determined learning processes. "

Participation in the "100 dollar laptop" project

Papert was hired as a consultant for the non-profit project $ 100 laptop for students. The student laptop is being developed especially for teaching in developing and emerging countries in order to reduce the digital divide in the world.

Fonts

• Mindstorms. Children, Computer and Powerful Ideas , Basic Books, New York, 1980, ISBN 0-465-04674-6
• Perceptrons , MIT-Press, 1988
• The networked family , Kreuz-Verlag 1998, ISBN 3-7831-1638-4
• Revolution of learning , Heise-Verlag 1994, ISBN 3-88229-041-2
• Do we dare to abolish fractions? A litmus test for supporters of educational technology , in: Hartmut Mitzlaff (2007, ed.), Internationales Handbuch: Computer (ICT), Elementary School, Kindergarten and New Learning Culture , Schneider Verlag, Hohengehren, ISBN 978-3-8340-0142-9 , Pp. 19-29

literature

• Gary S. Stager: Seymour Papert (1928-2016). Father of educational computing. In: Nature . Volume 537, No. 7620, 2016, p. 308, doi: 10.1038 / 537308a

Web links

Commons : Seymour Papert  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Private homepage of Seymour Papert
• Literature by and about Seymour Papert in the catalog of the German National Library
• Interview with Seymour Papert as part of the “One Laptop per Child” project - video stream
• Perspective89.com: "Learning theories and recent cognitive science findings: Implications for teaching"
• Seymour Papert in Beats Biblionetz with citations and bibliography

Individual evidence

1. ^ Seymour Papert on britannica.com, accessed August 2, 2016
2. ↑ Seymour Papert ( Memento of the original of March 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on web.media.mit.edu, accessed on August 2, 2016 
3. ↑ heise online: A computer must never be a status symbol - to the death of Seymour Papert. In: heise online. Retrieved August 3, 2016 . 
4. ↑ Papert: Revolution of Learning, page 49
5. ^ Papert: The networked family, page 52
6. ↑ Papert, Revolution of Thought, page 52
7. ^ Papert, Revolution of Learning, p. 8
8. ↑ Website of the project "One Laptop per Child" - "People" section