
Seymour Papert has died - j4mie
http://www.media.mit.edu/people/in-memory/papert
======
DonHopkins
Seymour Papert was a great philosopher, whose work on Constructionism has
uplifted many children, inspired the OLPC project, and continues to have a
huge positive influence on the world.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_\(learning_theory\))

Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from the MIT-AI
ITS system. It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful
practical lisp code, defining where the rubber meets the road, with drivers
for hardware like pots, plotters, robotic turtles, TV turtles, graphical
displays, XGP laser printers, music devices, and lots of other interesting
code and comments.

[http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp](http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp)

Here is a Logo Adventure game I wrote for Terrapin, the first program I ever
sold, which they distributed with C64 Terrapin Logo, because they wanted a
simple non-graphical game that showed off Logo's list processing capabilities:

[http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/logo/adventure.logo](http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/logo/adventure.logo)

Seymour Papert greatly inspired me, and I applied his work on Constructionist
Education to the open source version of SimCity for the OLPC.

[http://micropolisonline.com/static/documentation/HAR2009Tran...](http://micropolisonline.com/static/documentation/HAR2009Transcript.html)

~~~
lerpa
Although his methods probably contributed a lot to popularization of
computing, as a philosopher the mental model theory of knowledge has been
demonstrated insufficient a long while ago, although it remained popular in
the AI computer science field for much longer, the problems with that theory
were known even during the hey-day of Papert's work.

Just take a look at Hubert Dreyfus' work to better understand the issue.

~~~
bchjam
I don't think constructivism and embodied cognition are too far afield, they
both have an emphasis on environmental interaction. That sort of
intertwingedness goes along with the general thrust of Dreyfus' argument

(+ here's a link to Dreyfus' essay Why Heideggerian AI failed
[http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf](http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf))

------
qwertyuiop924
In 200x, when I was in 4th grade, my teacher said that that day, we would be
learning some programming. We were strictly a Mac school, and Scratch wasn't
as well known at the time, so the language and environment we learned was
Terrapin Logo.

There's nothing like looking at the screen and seeing something that you made
come to life for the first time. And there's nothing quite like being given a
problem that seems impossibly hard at first, cracking it, and seeing the
result in front of you. It was a magical moment, and though I would not do any
more work in logo (UCBLogo wouldn't compile for me), that sense of wonder and
magic, and that amazement and the feeling of looking at something, and
understanding the complexity that makes it work, and knowing that you designed
it, built it, and made it work, that is why I program. For the sheer joy of
it.

Thank you Seymour, for everything.

~~~
jkestner
You youths! I had a similar introduction to Logo, on an Apple ][ at a computer
day camp in the summer of 198x. We programmers tend to love learning the shiny
new languages, but it's thanks to the enduring idea behind _this_ language
that many of us acquired the love. I strive to build something as lasting.

Papert on the turtle, children and the physical version:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTd3N5Oj2jk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTd3N5Oj2jk)

~~~
dewarrn1
Like you, I learned Logo on an Apple ][ in the '80s. Apart from some dabbling
in between, I wouldn't pick up programming in a serious way until grad school.
Despite the long gap, that early start made a huge difference for me, and I'll
never forget the simple pleasures that Logo afforded me as a child.

------
reuven
I had the honor of meeting Seymour Papert on a few occasions (there's no way
that he would have remembered me), and coming away awestruck and inspired each
time.

I also read his books and papers, and did a PhD with one of his best-known
students, and never failed to come away thorough amazed by his vision, his
dedication, and his ability to execute on so much of that -- partly through
great research, partly through great execution on his own, and partly through
inspiring generations of students of all ages and backgrounds.

Indeed, my PhD research was driven by my interest in pushing Papert's vision
one step closer to reality. And my work training at companies around the world
constantly tries to make things more constructionist, more exploratory, and
thus better for my students.

If you haven't yet read Mindstorms, you should. You might think that it's a
book about using Logo to teach kids, but it's not. Rather, it's a book about
how children think and learn, and about how to encourage them to think and
learn.

It's terribly sad that Papert has passed away, but his vision and ideas live
on amount countless people who are better thinkers and educators as a result.

~~~
jdcarter
I'll second the recommendation on "Mindstorms." The book is visionary and just
as relevant today as when he wrote it. I teach programming and electronics to
kids (just an hour a week) and my teaching is heavily influenced by Mindstorms
to this day.

In addition, my own first exposure to computers with with LOGO on an Apple II.
Papert changed my life, and the enduring quality of his work will continue to
change lives for years to come.

~~~
jonnycowboy
Do you have any details of what and how you teach the kids? I am interested in
setting something similar up in our neighborhood.

~~~
jdcarter
I'm sorry, at the moment I don't have teaching materials in any presentable
form. I tried Arduino-based projects, making parts of a 2D game in
Swift+SpriteKit, fooling with Minecraft redstone, and worked through Google's
blockly games.

Arduino seemed to be click the best, because it involves a lot of working with
your hands (both breadboard and soldering) and you can "see" your creation
working in a way that you just don't get with pure-software teaching. At least
for the ages I was working with (8-10 y/o) blinking a LED held more joy than
putting a 2D sprite into a window.

I thought about publishing a more formal project curriculum, but there's a ton
of Arduino project books already on the market, so it didn't seem worth it.
Instead I just pitch a couple ideas to the kids, see what they want to do,
then we spend several sessions building that.

------
wallflower
RIP, Seymour Papert.

Scratch is the spiritual successor to Logo.

As Scratch becomes more and more popular, it has been sad to say that there is
a tension between the spirit of Scratch and commercialization. Scratch is all
about exploration and making mistakes and experiential learning. However,
there is a deluge of companies who are trying to create curriculums for
Scratch that fit into the traditional School lesson models (canned, cut and
dry).

Here are some of the better alternatives:

Google has developed the CS First program which uses Scratch. The interesting
thing about this program is that it tries to scale the problem of teaching CS
by making it less necessary for the teacher to know CS.

[https://www.cs-first.com/](https://www.cs-first.com/)

There is also a curriculum guide for Scratch.

[http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/guide/](http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/guide/)

~~~
sitkack
When we learned Logo, the teacher was learning right along with us. What a
teacher can do, is encourage metacognition, so when a child either gets or
not-gets something, they can organize it in their mind.

I like scratch, but it seems so Bubble Gum. Logo on an Apple II had a
beautiful austerity to it.

~~~
jhbadger
Logo doesn't get enough credit. It is more than just a system for turtle
graphics, but a real programming language with a lot of similarity to Lisp.
Brian Harvey at Berkeley used to be proponent of even using it as an
alternative to Lisp for teaching functional programming to undergraduates.

------
joaorico
"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." [0]

Although Papert is most known for Logo, he did not believe learning how to
program was specially good in itself.

It is the fact that the computer allows the child to model almost everything
(at almost no cost) that allowed that child to develop and fall in love with a
topic, the same way he fell in love with gears at a very young age.

In his own words [1]: "It did not occur to me that anyone could possibly take
my statement to mean that learning to program would in itself have
consequences for how children learn and think. [...] But encouraging
programming as an activity meant to be good in itself is far removed, in its
nature, from working at identifying ideas that have been disempowered and
seeking ways to re-empower them."

[0] Papert - "Mindstorms" in the Foreword: 'The Gears of My Childhood'

[1] Papert - "What’s the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power"

~~~
joaorico
From the same Foreword:

"A modern-day Montessori might propose, if convinced by my story, to create a
gear set for children. Thus every child might have the experience I had. But
to hope for this would be to miss the essence of the story. I fell in love
with the gears. This is something that cannot be reduced to purely "cognitive"
terms. Something very personal happened, and one cannot assume that it would
be repeated for other children in exactly the same form.

My thesis could be summarized as: What the gears cannot do the computer might.
The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its
power to simulate."

------
panic
2016 strikes again. :(

Seymour Papert was "co-creator of Logo" in much the same way that Doug
Engelbart was "creator of the mouse". Their ideas were bigger than something
you can fit in a headline. Papert believed that computers had a unique
potential to help us learn and think. Anyone interested in computers or
education should check out his book _Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and
Powerful Ideas_.

~~~
setpatchaddress
I want to emphasize the "or" in that last sentence -- everyone should read
Mindstorms.

------
richard_todd
For many years, I completely associated Logo with "turtle graphics" \-- like
it was a toy for kids to learn programming ideas. I only realized a couple
years ago that it's a pretty capable language. The best references I found are
a 3-volume set that covers using Logo for symbolic computation, making
compilers, a diff tool, etc. PDF/HTML at
[https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html)

~~~
DonHopkins
Logo is essentially just Lisp without parenthesis. Everything is possible, and
it's all self contained and defined in terms of itself!

Leigh Klotz wrote a 6502 assembly language assembler in Logo for Terrapin Logo
for the Apple ][ and C64, which you could use to extend Logo do to anything
you wanted, like interfacing to hardware.

~~~
eggy
I've been playing with Lhogho - Logo compiler [1]. The creator has done some
amazing things with it and other projects too.

I had an OpenGL spinning pyramid up in 10 minutes and an EXE for windows and
an executable for Linux too. Pretty cool, but it is not being developed any
longer. It runs fine on my Win 10 box and Linux Ubuntu 14 box.

I found it when looking into Logo because I was working with the modeling
software NetLogo [2].

[1] [http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/](http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/)

[2]
[https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/](https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/)

------
CaRDiaK
"People laughed at Seymour Papert in the sixties when he talked about children
using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity." \-
I'm glad he continued his work. My most fond memory of when I first saw a
computer.. and it was running logo. I was amazed by all those keys! I would
definitely not be here today if it were not for this gentleman. I got into
trouble in school for throwing away the provided instructions and started to
hack that turtle into writing my name the moment I realized I could control
it. I never looked back from that day, I was 8 years old. RIP Seymour.

------
throw42
My office was next door to Seymour's office at the Media Lab. This was before
the motorcycle accident in Vietnam. I was a freshly arrived student from
India. His main observation about India was about how the IITs were terrible
for the country because they left such a profound debilitating effect on those
who did not make it to those schools.

~~~
throwaway2998
Interesting. Greetings from India .

Could you elaborate on his thoughts on that ?

I too sometimes feel like I've missed out on a good education. But I feel it's
too late now to change that. :(

~~~
gohrt
My guess is that Papert believed that IIT curriculum (or similar) should be
taught everywhere, not limited to the few seats in IIT.

~~~
gizmodo59
I'm not sure about this. Stanford/Harvard is much more than the curriculum.

~~~
josegonzalez
Based on what you are responding to, it sounds like you are saying those not
at said schools should not learn what is in the curriculum.

~~~
thomasfoster96
I don't think the comment meant that, rather that a lot of the success of
those institutions in educating people comes from having better facilities,
better teachers, better community, etc.

~~~
sleepychu
>better facilities, better teachers, better community

This. I had a few good teachers at university that taught me a lot, this made
it painfully apparent how little I was learning in some other classes. I guess
it's the same everywhere but I suppose you'd expect that the prestige of the
IIT would attract the 'better teachers' of course in practice it probably
attracts the more prominent experts which isn't the same thing at all ;-)

------
ontouchstart
[https://www.c-span.org/video/?67583-1/technology-
education](https://www.c-span.org/video/?67583-1/technology-education)

Technology In Education The committee examined technological advances in
education. OCTOBER 12, 1995

Alan Brown Superintendent Public Schools

Chris Dede Professor George Mason University

Jeffrey Joseph Vice President U.S. Chamber of Commerce->Domestic Policy

Alan Kay Fellow Apple Computer->Learning Concepts

Cheryl Lemke Associate Superintendent Illinois->Board of Education

Edward McCracken President and CEO Silicon Graphics

Deborah McGriff Senior Vice President Edison Project

Robert W. Mendenhall Vice President IBM->K-12 Industry Division

Seymour Papert Professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology->Technology

David Shaw Chief Executive Officer Shaw Investment Company

Pat Wright Vice President TCI Educational Technologies

~~~
ontouchstart
This is a long 1995 congress hearing video that I doubt many people have time
and patience to sit through. But if you fast forward to the debate between
D.E. Shaw and Seymour Papert/Alan Kay, you will find out 20 years later, the
hardware progress is almost exactly as Shaw had predicted, on the other hand,
we are far from the vision of Seymour Papert and Alan Kay.

~~~
aidenn0
Do you have an approximate timestamp?

~~~
ontouchstart
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12209538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12209538)

------
gbin
Python has a "logo inspired" turtle in the standard lib:
[https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/turtle.html](https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/turtle.html)

We played with it with my son and it brought back memories from the 80s when
the French government made a big push on Logo in the schools.

~~~
daeken
Oh man, you absolutely made my day. I've been teaching my fiancee bits of
Python for the past couple days (her first code ever!) and this library made
it all make sense. It let her take all the little concepts I taught her, and
put them together to make something cool. She just wrote a street with houses
on it, generated by a simple for loop!

~~~
sn9
The freely available online book _Think Python_ is a fantastic introduction to
both CS and Python and includes a chapter on turtle graphics with some fun
exercises.

~~~
coroxout
There's a Udacity mini-course with a fun section on Python turtle graphics,
too.

[https://www.udacity.com/course/viewer#!/c-ud036/l-1004409226...](https://www.udacity.com/course/viewer#!/c-ud036/l-1004409226/m-1013388828)
(UD-036 Programming Foundations with Python, lesson 2A)

------
mattkevan
A sad day. My first programming experiences were with Logo, before I even
realised that was what it was.

In primary school we had a robot turtle attached to a BBC Micro with a long
cable which trundled around the floor drawing wonky shapes. At the time it was
one of the most amazing things I'd seen - and was probably similar to, if not
exactly the same as this:
[http://www.classicacorn.freeuk.com/8bit_focus/logo/logo.html](http://www.classicacorn.freeuk.com/8bit_focus/logo/logo.html)

Later, in secondary school, I remember amazing our teacher by getting the
Acorn Archimedes we had to produce multicoloured spirograph-like patterns.

Being able to type something - and then the computer actually going and doing
it (or not) was both frustrating and fantastic, and left me with a lifelong
interest in programming and learning new stuff.

Thank you Seymour.

------
ideonexus
One of my favorite Papert quotes from Mindstorms. I think it summarizes the
potential of computers to revolutionize learning by empowering children to be
autonomous explorers instead of learner-automatons. I hope one day our
education systems will recognize this and flip the system, but it's hard to
change culture:

 _IN MOST contemporary educational situations where children come into contact
with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to
provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback,
and to dispense information. The computer programming the child. In the LOGO
environment the relationship is reversed: The child, even at preschool ages,
is in control: The child programs the computer. And in teaching the computer
how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves
think. The experience can be heady: Thinking about thinking turns the child
into an epistemologist, an experience not even shared by most adults._

------
tel
If you haven't read Mindstorms yet and you have any interest at all in how
learning, mathematics, and programming are interrelated then please take a
moment to go buy it today.

There's little risk that Papert's ideas will fail to last—they are already
embedded in so much of how we think about programming—but reading that book
helps to emphasize just how far we are away from the ideas he was able to see
just by talking with people about how they learn.

Truly, truly inspirational man. I'm sad he's now gone.

------
booleanbetrayal
I'm an engineer at Pedago, and work on a product called Smartly
([https://smart.ly](https://smart.ly)).

Although the target audience differs a bit, Papert's work was the
philosophical bedrock for the work we're doing. In fact, when the company was
founded, it was agreed upon that it'd be best for all employees to read
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas. If you haven't read this
book, and you are even the slightest bit interested in education and how we
construct mental models, it's definitely worth the read.

I only hope he would have approved of what we've tried to build!

RIP, Seymour Papert.

------
agumonkey
Anecdote: Logo was used in French 80s National "Plan Informatique Pour Tous"
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_informatique_pour_tous](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_informatique_pour_tous)
(Computing for all), running on Thomson MO5 terminals distributed in many
schools. Kids (6-9yo I believe) would learn to "program" using it. For the
younger ones it was mostly about moving that infamous turtle, and that was it.
It was still something utterly magical, even though the lightpen bundled with
the MO5 was also a big part of it.

~~~
draven
I remember playing with logo on MO5. The teacher used a TO7. IIRC we managed
to get some geometrical figures using loops, like eg a "square-y spiral."

~~~
agumonkey
Yes, that's what I recall too. Most kids were confused by the relativity of
orientation since left when facing down is right ... After that classes were
about the word processor and paint program.

Something I wish I could investigate; was the network infrastructure. I don't
know if my school was special but there was a bit networked server that could
communicate with other schools (we even had online contests). I also remember
seeing its screen trashed. Teacher said "there's a virus.".

------
neves
If you are an ACM member, you can download Papert's classic Mindstorm book
here:
[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1095592&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFI...](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1095592&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=650941053&CFTOKEN=72086634&preflayout=flat)

(yes, the lego robot gets its name from this book)

------
Tomte
Just yesterday I finished "Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams" by Resnick who
builds heavily upon Papert's work.

Mindstorms is on my backlog.

I have fond recollections about my first contact with Turtles. It didn't shape
me or anything like that, but I'd like to take Logo out again and play with
it.

Is there a recommended modernish Logo (running on Windows), or should I simply
go to Processing?

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
Try UCBLogo
([https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html))
or NetLogo
([https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/](https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/)).

~~~
voltagex_
I was told in another thread [0] that NetLogo isn't really suitable for
"turtle graphics" and is apparently for "actor based modelling". I certainly
found the interface overwhelming.

When I last used Logo it was in mswLogo [1].

There's also Lhogho [2], Python's turtle module [3] and FMSLogo [4]

0:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149061)

1: [http://www.softronix.com/logo.html](http://www.softronix.com/logo.html)
(not sure if this is the original site)

2: [http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/](http://lhogho.sourceforge.net/)

3:
[https://docs.python.org/3.0/library/turtle.html](https://docs.python.org/3.0/library/turtle.html)

4: [http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/](http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/)

------
drawkbox
His central tenet could be useful in rebuilding the U.S. education systems
more like Finland where it is project based, real-world based.

 _" The central tenet of his Constructionist theory of learning is that people
build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in
constructing things in the world."_

 _" you cannot think about thinking without thinking about thinking about
something"_

------
japhyr
I grew up in the late 70s and early 80s. I first learned about programming
from my father, who worked at DEC during its prime. To this day I deeply
appreciate him sharing his love of the field with me from ayoung age. My first
computer-related memories are learning to program in BASIC on a kit computer
we had in our unfinished basement. I loved learning in a cold basement cellar
surrounded by pieces of electronic gear in a makeshit office.

My second earliest memory about computers centers around learning Logo on an
Apple II (I believe) in third grade. I remember exactly what Seymour
describes: being shown the basics, and then being free to explore by making
the turtle do what I wanted it to. I remember sketching designs in a notebook
and then asking enough questions about angles and distances to be able to
implement my designs.

I think my love of programming comes from an equal mix of people like my
father who I could learn from directly, and people like Seymour who created
systems that made it possible to learn independently.

------
tomcam
You can try LOGO in your browser with this Javascript-based interpreter by the
inimitable Joshual Bell:
[http://www.calormen.com/jslogo/](http://www.calormen.com/jslogo/)

~~~
ontouchstart
Thanks for the link.

I wrote a simple LOGO program to honor Seymour Papert.

[https://twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/760309863608160256](https://twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/760309863608160256)

------
gfodor
Of course, Logo was just a means to an end, something that was meant to be one
example of many as to how to introduce children to the medium of computing. As
is often the case the wider message was lost -- to me this was much like when
englebart died and he was called "the inventor of the mouse." Mindstorms is a
must read.

------
ontouchstart
Seymour Papert and Paulo Freire Debate Technology and the Future of Schools

[https://youtu.be/4V-0KfBdWao](https://youtu.be/4V-0KfBdWao)

~~~
neves
Wow, two of my heroes together! Sure it will be better than Batman Vs
Superman...

------
oulipo
Seymour Papert was an inspiring and caring researcher, and he will inspire
many generations to come. His work was truly groundbreaking, subtle and
profound, and I encourage everyone to read some of his books, notably
Mindstorm and Children's Machine

[https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-
Powerfu...](https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful-
Ideas/dp/0465046746/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1470065417&sr=8-1&keywords=mindstorm+book+papert)

[https://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Machine-Rethinking-
School-C...](https://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Machine-Rethinking-School-
Computer/dp/0465010636)

------
picklesman
LogoWriter was my entry into programming. I started with the turtle in
elementary school, and in early high school my mind was blown when I leaned
about the "flip side", where you could use functions and script things.

In grade 7 I used it to make an elaborate multi screen Sierra inspired game
that took the better part of the year to make. What I would give to have a
copy of it now...

RIP. Thanks for Logo and everything else.

------
zalmoxes
Anyone interested in educational technology should read Mindstorms and
Powerful Ideas. Papert described how technology should be used in schools and
also predicted most issues and trends with education today.

Papert work is also present in most educational/programming toys we see today
- Scratch, Kibo
[http://kinderlabrobotics.com/kibo/](http://kinderlabrobotics.com/kibo/),
LittleBits, LEGO Mindstorms all owe their roots to Paperts ideas.

[http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/](http://worrydream.com/MeanwhileAtCodeOrg/)

~~~
justincormack
Absolutely, Mindstorms is one of the best books about learning ever written.
Everyone should read it. Buy it now!

------
edtechdev
You can find some of his work at:
[http://www.papert.org/](http://www.papert.org/)

and more background info on him on Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert)

------
nxzero
New York Times coverage, "Seymour Papert, 88, Dies; Saw Education’s Future in
Computers":

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/technology/seymour-
pape...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/technology/seymour-
papert-88-dies-saw-educations-future-in-computers.html)

~~~
cnojima
Truly a legend, will be sorely missed

------
j0e1
Logo was the first language that familiarized me with the fundamentals of
programming and got me excited about computers back when I was in 4th grade in
India, in the late 90s. It's amazing how a person's vision and hard work can
have such far-reaching impact. I'm grateful for his life and work. Rest in
Peace Seymour Papert.

------
wiz21
So Long, and Thanks for All the Turtles

------
pfooti
Wow, RIP - he was a big inspiration to me professionally both in terms of the
tech he helped build and in terms of the learning theory of which he was a
proponent. (I also work at the intersection of education, learning sciences,
and technology).

[0] is a great video from the early days of LOGO, and he's pushing notions of
programming for all that felt new and revolutionary in the 2000s.

Mindstorms [1] is a great book if you're interested in his ideas about
learning.

0:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMzojQFyMo0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMzojQFyMo0)

1: [https://amzn.com/0465046746](https://amzn.com/0465046746)

------
314
As a child of the 80s logo was one of the first languages that I learned.
Although the relative motion was difficult to understand, and functions seemed
to be impossibly hard - they worked eventually. 15 years later when I
encountered functional programming for the first time I remember the shock and
awe that somebody had the foresight to plantvthose seeds so long in advance.

Later still I became a teacher, and learning about constructivism for the
first time I encountered Seymour's published body of work. So mindblowing. The
passion and the vision inspired my career.

RIP Seymour, you will be missed, but after what you have given to the world
you will never be forgotten.

------
davidf18
He came to my high school to teach for the academic year when I was 16

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Laboratory_High_Sch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Laboratory_High_School_\(Urbana,_Illinois\))

He was a very, very warm person that clearly loved children. I remember him
juggling oranges (or balls?).

I wanted to work with Papert and implemented LOGO with graphics on the
university's computers when I was 16 using an instruction manual from Bolt,
Beranek and Newman (now BBN Tech). I still remember showing it to him.

------
nekopa
Actually, when you look at any kind of programming, it is:

Turtles, turtles all the way down.

RIP

------
kylek
I never had the opportunity to use Logo, but I think it's obvious how much
influence Seymour had on our industry and many of our paths. RIP.

------
smallbag
I just installed Scratch and I find it awful but I am not a teenager. When a
child realize that to simulate a small movement or scene you need to feed the
computer with a lot of parameters he/she get bored. Fractals, like the Julia
image, inspire us with deep thinking. What we want is to learn new concepts in
such a way that the ratio power/(number of parameters) is very low. The logo
idea is not about a turtle or a moving pen, is about the realization that you
can draw complex images with a few parameters. I see loops as a form of
parameters in a program. Snake moving is boring, we want to drive a drone.
Virtual reality is a way of improving the way in which we feed parameters to
the machine, another way is the machine learning about the programmer,
completion of sentences, suggestions and predictions are a first step. A new
logo is needed but one without turtles.

------
wiremine
I very clearly remember using Logo in 1st grade over 30 years ago. Looking
back, it was clearly what hooked me to get into CS.

Thanks Dr. Papert!

------
ontouchstart
History of the original LOGO turtle (the actual robot):

[http://cyberneticzoo.com/cyberneticanimals/1969-the-logo-
tur...](http://cyberneticzoo.com/cyberneticanimals/1969-the-logo-turtle-
seymour-papert-marvin-minsky-et-al-american/)

~~~
justincormack
Turtles are older than that, 1950s.

------
eggy
I had just started learning NetLogo, which led me to Lhogho, a compiled Logo,
and then references to Seymour Papert's book Mindstorms that piqued my
interest. I'll have to give it a go seeing as how many people have spoken so
highly of this book. Sad news go lose such a thinker.

------
tudorw
What an awesome contribution. I had a good chat with an educationalist about
Logo and the hardware device that I experienced in the 70's with a pen that we
programmed in primary school, we had a super progressive maths heavy
headmaster, hey, maybe that explains something...anyway, a comment was that
the more modern turtles made the pen inside the device less obvious and that
this small change led to a diminished experience as the children did not get
to see first hand the final act of creation, instead it came out of a 'magic
box' that did something they maybe did not comprehend, these kind of subtle
things show that inter-disciplinary work is super important.

------
mtokunaga
I did not have a fortune to get to know the LOGO or even SMALLTALK languages.
By the time I've heard about it, it is the C++ or even C, and all us
"professionals" dismissed this. I've just read up on the LOGO language on the
Wiki, and some of its fortes are based on its roots in functional (encouraging
recursions over a set) and declarative style. These people were already
thinking about many years ahead for me. I would imagine my career would have
been more enriched if I have encountered this early on in my life.

------
syk26
I made an account today, just to comment on this news. Seymour Papert's work
on Constructionism really struck a chord with me. I first learned about his
work in college, and things like Logo really resonated with me - to point
where I have now changed my career path from an engineer to one that is more
education focused. I really hope people everywhere, and at least users on this
site will learn more about his work and his importance.

------
kkylin
Perceptrons remains one of my favorite books in many ways. Obviously the
single-layer networks Minsky & Papert analyze are very primitive relative to
today's deep neural networks, and the actual mathematical content may not be
of direct use today. But the arguments were beautiful & insightful, and the
exposition clear. For anyone interested in a mathematical understanding of
computation in (artificial) neural networks, it's still not a bad place to
start.

------
yladiz
This is the first time I've heard of Seymour, but it looks like he really
tried to increase education around programming and computers, especially with
younger kids/teenagers (e.g. Logo in Lego Windstorms, One Laptop Per Child),
and for that I'm deeply respectful. Making computers and programming more
accessible is really wonderful.

RIP Seymour Papert.

------
pseud0r
Sad day.

I think Bret Victor is right in that Seymour Papert's ideas are not useful
only in teaching children about computers.

This essay inspired by Mindstorms is a great read
[http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/](http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/)

------
sgt101
He said “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.” This is very revealing about the actual nature of
learning, human and machine, and it's something that the ML community has
simply ignored.

------
ontouchstart
NY Times : [http://nytimes.com/2016/08/02/technology/seymour-
papert-88-d...](http://nytimes.com/2016/08/02/technology/seymour-
papert-88-dies-saw-educations-future-in-computers.html)

------
xeropho
my first memory of using a computer is Logo where we were asked to do
anything. I usually gave very large numbers and got interesting geometric
patterns on my screen ...exciting stuff for a 10 year old.

------
apricot
As a math teacher with a background in computer science, Papert's work has
influenced me tremendously, although I never got the chance to meet him.

His spirit lives on in his books.

------
ontouchstart
Seymour Papert Tribute at IDC 2013

[https://tltl.stanford.edu/papert_tribute](https://tltl.stanford.edu/papert_tribute)

------
bwldrbst
Learning Logo on a Microbee in 1987 was my first introduction to computers. I
remember being immensely excited when I figured out how to draw a circle.

------
edem
This post might be competing for the "Most time spent on the front page"
Award, right?

------
philippeback
RIP. Also check [http://phratch.org](http://phratch.org)

------
ehudla
Where I met Logo:

1984, Devotion School, Brookline, Massachusetts, Apple computers, Then at
home: TI-99/4A.

You?

------
ocschwar
PU WAIT 7200 PD

Thanks for your work, Mr. Papert

------
brudgers
Announcement on front page of the Logo Foundation:
[http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/](http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-
foundation/)

~~~
sctb
Thanks, we updated the link from
[https://twitter.com/LogoFoundation/status/760057041687830528](https://twitter.com/LogoFoundation/status/760057041687830528).

~~~
beefman
Better but not great because the new link is not specific to this story. This
is a better link

[http://www.media.mit.edu/people/in-
memory/papert](http://www.media.mit.edu/people/in-memory/papert)

It was submitted but incorrectly marked as a dupe

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12204756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12204756)

~~~
dang
Thanks very much. We've changed to that from [http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-
foundation/](http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/).

------
tel
Black bar, please.

~~~
ontouchstart
Definitely.

~~~
DonHopkins
Thank you!

~~~
ontouchstart
I didn't do it. Just noticed it.

