
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980) [pdf] - tosh
http://worrydream.com/refs/Papert%20-%20Mindstorms%201st%20ed.pdf
======
marviel
I like this bit: "In the LOGO environment new ideas are often acquired as a
means of satisfying a personal need to do something one could not do before.
In a traditional school setting, the beginning student encounters the notion
of variable in little problems such as: 5 + X = 8. What is X? Few children see
this as a personally relevant problem, and even fewer experience the method of
solution as a source of power. They are right. In the context of, their lives,
they can't do much with it. In the LOGO encounter, the situation is very much
different. Here the child has a personal need: To make a spiral. In this
context the idea of a variable is a source of personal power, power to do
something desired but inaccessible without this idea. Of course, many children
who encounter the not~ion of variable in a traditional setting do learn to use
it effectively. But it seldom conveys a sense of "mathpower," not even to the
mathematically best and brightest. And this is the point of greatest contrast
between an encounter with the idea of variables in the traditional school and
in the LOGO environment. In LOGO, the concept empowers the child, and the
child experiences what it is like for mathematics to enable whole cultures to
do what no one could do before."

~~~
heretoo
This book is way up there on my list to read! And I really should, because I
probably don't agree with everything, but I probably also know nothing.

Rant follows:

I went home from school every day seeing an application in my own projects for
everything I learnt, from mathematics to history, because I could include it
in my software projects, or table top related games, so the text reminded me
of teenager's typical complaints regarding learning mathematics.

Kids say that they don't need mathematics because it has no application in the
real world, but if kids were qualified to make that comment, then they should
be out working from a very young age, to gain real world experience.

"5 + X = 8" represents abstract thought, which kids find challenging, and
teenagers don't like to be challenged, whereas, when kids start to read and
write, they love being challenged, and yet, they comfortably learn a tool
which also represents abstract thought.

I think teenagers are just learning to be sufficiently lazy and pragmatic, but
that they aren't qualified to know how to stretch their brains in the long
term.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Teaching math in the absence of its applications is the problem. Algebra and
calculus seem pointless when you don’t know why you’d really use it beyond
simple word problems on exams. Given an interesting reason and purpose to use
math would probably improve learning a lot. Having a class called math is
maybe not the best place to learn math, maybe they should learn it in physics
instead.

------
ergothus
My biggest LEGO discoveries as a child came about due to limitations:

My mom would take me to visit her parents, which (once the sun went down and I
couldn't run around outside) was very boring. I didn't have my huge lego
collection from home, but they did have a small collection from when their
kids were younger.

No hinges, no spinners, no windows - basically nothing special, just bricks
and long-thin-flat pieces. (I don't know the terms).

boring, boring, boring...until I discovered that you could take a thin piece
and connect one dot from above and below to other pieces( "-=" ), and that
piece was now free to swivel. If the two pieces you used were also long thin
pieces, you could connect the other end to a single dot of a fourth piece, and
you now had a double joint. ( "-=-" )

I built many "robots" top play with like this, that were basically 90 degrees
from normal (the "top" of the legos would be the "front" of the robot.

I played with Legos for years in a variety of ways, but this was one of the
few where I "discovered" something. Other times I learned to alter direction
of the build by containing a length of joints inside a "tunnel" of bricks, so
that the plane of the joints would be at 90 degrees to the plane of the bricks
(the "top" of the bricks could be the "top" of the figure, while the "top" of
the joints would be the "front" of the figure, or vice-versa). This allowed me
to build humanoid figures with knees that faced forward but arms that bent
outward or over the "chest", or scorpion-like figures with claws that closed
side-to-side but legs that extended out to the sides and moved up-down.

Later I expanded the collection with more special pieces that allowed me to
put such joints on hinges or spinners, but I honestly believe I'd never have
gotten there if I hadn't been bored with no other options. I'm POSITIVE others
knew these tricks, but I never encountered it in any of their materials and I
didn't have friends to tell me.

I was excited about mindstorms, but as they became more advanced when I was
just out of college and busy learning how to handle a marriage and a career I
never got into them, and I wonder if they encourage their own sort of
discovery like that, or if it's too specific.

~~~
eschaton
You know this is the book about pedagogy and computing by Seymour Papert, and
not the product by LEGO, right?

~~~
jacobolus
Seems relevant.

The analogy would be following the Lego set instructions vs. self-directed
free play with a few limited pieces is like traditional math class vs.
learning math via playing with the Logo turtle.

Also the “Lego Mindstorms” product was a collaborative effort with the MIT
media lab, and is named after Papert’s book.

~~~
eternalban
However Lego analogy breaks down when we progress to stage II (image making)
and III (theorizing).

------
joveian
Even as someone who was exposed to LOGO as a child and didn't like it I found
this book really excellent when I read it a couple of decades go.

A great quote from the foreword: "Slowly I began to formulate what I still
consider the fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can
assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be
painfully difficult."

------
joe_the_user
I can only skim a nearly 300 page book but I get the impression that the basic
point is that, done right, computers can be an amazing tool to allow a child's
natural impulses to play and exploration to grow and flourish.

Seems reasonable enough. So what went wrong to the point that today, primary
advice to parents wanting to encourage growth in their kids is to remove the
computer completely?

This also is connected in my mind to the period where learning to program was
connected to basic literacy but now just avoiding the computer until one is
old enough to handle it is closer to a road to basic literacy.

Is there a different way we can take this.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
What went wrong is that these systems were designed by extremely smart CS PhDs
who massively overestimated the abilities of the average human.

Papert, Kay, etc, are all world-class smart, capable, and inventive people.
They designed these systems in their own image, probably with a more or less
conscious desire to build something they would have wanted in their own
childhoods.

An average human with average abilities doesn't have the cognitive horsepower
or the creativity to get much from these systems. They can play with them in a
fairly superficial way, but only a relatively small proportion - I'd guess
less than 25% - will get excited by the ability to imagine and build their own
systems.

Without that excitement there's no motivation, and without the motivation any
kind of programming becomes an exercise in pointlessness.

So - you can move a pointer around and draw lines? By typing words? Cute. But
so what? Why should I care?

The real challenge - much harder than designing computer software - is working
out political and educational strategies that reach the (nominal) 75% who
don't find that kind of problem solving particularly interesting.

I've literally just been reading Kay's mini-book on the history of Smalltalk.
Here's a quote on literacy:

"Literacy, for example, is being able to fluently read and follow the 50 page
argument in Paine's Common Sense and being able (and happy) to fluently write
a critique or defense of it. Another kind of 20th century literacy is being
able to hear about a new fatal contagious incurable disease and instantly know
that a disastrous exponential relationship holds and early action is of the
highest priority. Another kind of literacy would take citizens to their
personal computers where they can fluently and without pain build a systems
simulation of the disease to use as a comparison against further information."

This sounds perfect, but I think the experience of almost everyone who has
been to school knows that a fair proportion of their age cohort not only can't
think at this level, but has absolutely no interest in being able to.

You might - possibly - be able to do something about this with a historically
unique social engineering program supported by a media campaign that made
abstract skills appear desirable and heroic. (A version of this happened
during the Cold War, kind of.) But even then, it's not obvious from history
just how far you could take that.

Either way, technology on its own is never going to be a solution. It may
support policy, but it's never going to be powerful enough to enlighten the
surrounding culture.

What actually happens is that economic and political pressures steer
technology towards offering simple - often poor, but understandable -
solutions to common problems. Worse wins out over better, and over time the
possibilities shrink instead of expanding.

~~~
jonahx
I sense this won't be a popular answer, but it aligns with my experience
teaching both english and math to undergraduates, as well as my personal
observation.

Disheartening but true.

~~~
jacobolus
Have you tried teaching 5 year olds? By the time they reach college, the
curiosity has been thoroughly stomped out of many people.

------
ianbicking
One thing I liked from Mindstorms was the concept of Microworlds. (Both names
have since been turned into product names, but seemingly unrelated to the
actual ideas.)

Turtle graphics is one Microworld, specifically based around geometry. Hence
its relatively novel use of angles and lengths instead of coordinates.

Each world gives people something to explore. That they do it programmatically
is interesting, and allows for different kinds of exploration, but it's the
world they are exploring, not the code.

Mindstorms hints at the idea that there should be many such microworlds. Maybe
they all use Logo, or maybe not.

What didn't happen is all those other Microworlds. But some have happened:
Processing ([https://processing.org/](https://processing.org/)) is one
example. And I think it's notable that "Processing", the graphical approach,
is treated separately from any particular language implementation;
Processing.js is another valid implementation of the same microworld.

But there could be many more! And I think it's much more interesting than yet
another puzzle-based block programming language to teach coding.

1\. Choose Your Own Adventure approaches to nonlinear fiction, which starts
without any programming but easily opens up into all sorts of other
complexity. ([http://twinery.org/](http://twinery.org/) is an example
implementation)

2\. Music generation. (e.g., [http://foxdot.org/](http://foxdot.org/))

3\. Lots of procedural generation, really. Something as simple as cartoon face
generation could be interesting. But starting with primitives (like in
[https://happycoding.io/examples/processing/creating-
variable...](https://happycoding.io/examples/processing/creating-
variables/random-face)) hides the fun and interesting part behind graphics
coding.

4\. Eliza, in her original implementation, is like a very simple programming
language for interaction.

5\. Quiz generation. Writing a program that creates a math worksheet seems
dumb, but I think a lot of kids would find it both interesting and satisfying.

6\. Agent simulation (ala
[https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/](https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/))

Of course all these things exist, but they often aren't matched up with an
appropriate introduction and a humane programming environment designed to
actually work for children. Working towards that – and doing so with a love
not just for programming, but for the concrete (if simulated) worlds you are
opening up through programming – could lead to something much more interesting
than a lot of current technology-based education.

~~~
juliendorra
Explorable microworld is an interesting way to think about specialized
Language+IDE combos.

For example I like LiveCodeLab[1] a lot, and it’s also a fun tool to intro
total beginners to the pleasure of programming (“write and something
happens”). It has very few primitives, but you can build some very interesting
live visuals, and the language is build on interesting choices driven by its
live nature [2]

Another great combined tool is OpenSCAD [3]. It’s really a computational tool
to explore solid, printable objects, and thus seems to fit the microworld
category.

A weird, niche one is Context Free, that didn’t grow like Processing but has
it’s own advantages and particularity (like how randomness is managed) [4]

[1] [https://livecodelab.net/](https://livecodelab.net/) [2]
[https://rumblesan.com/static/LiveCodeLang-
Farm2014.pdf](https://rumblesan.com/static/LiveCodeLang-Farm2014.pdf) [3]
[https://www.openscad.org/](https://www.openscad.org/) [4]
[https://www.contextfreeart.org/](https://www.contextfreeart.org/)

