Sublime

Out of the crucible of computational concepts and metaphors, of predicted widespread computer power and of actual experiments with children, the idea of Piagetian learning has emerged as an important organizing principle. Translated into practical terms this idea sets a research agenda concerned with creating conditions for children to explore “nat

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Projects. Seymour provocatively argued for “projects over problems.” Of course, Seymour understood the importance of problem solving. But he believed that people learn to solve problems (and learn new concepts and strategies) most effectively while they are actively engaged in meaningful projects. Too often, schools start by teaching concepts to st

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The process reminds one of tinkering; learning consists of building up a set of materials and tools that one can handle and manipulate. Perhaps most central of all, it is a process of working with what you’ve got. We’re all familiar with this process on the conscious level, for example, when we attack a problem empirically, trying out all the thing

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Papert saw that Jean Piaget, his old mentor, had got it wrong. As children grew up, they did not move from physical learning through imaginary learning and on to formal or rational learning, leaving the earlier modes behind as they ‘outgrew’ them. On the contrary, imagining and reasoning added to observing and experimenting, making practical learni

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Piaget’s great insight was that knowledge is not delivered from teacher to learner; rather, children are constantly constructing knowledge through their everyday interactions with people and objects around them. Seymour’s constructionism theory adds a second type of construction, arguing that children construct knowledge most effectively when they

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First, there was the continuity principle: The mathematics must be continuous with well-established personal knowledge from which it can inherit a sense of warmth and value as well as “cognitive” competence. Then there was the power principle: It must empower the learner to perform personally meaningful projects that could not be done without it. F

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