 Very happy to be here. It's good to be talking to scientists, mathematicians, engineers, tinkers, people who enjoy the experience of evidence-based research. As someone who speaks to scientists every week on Science Friday, our speakers today, almost all of them have been a guest. We're in our 26th year now. Almost all of them have been a guest on Science Friday, or will be a guest on Science Friday one of these days. I'm hoping that we will not have to put up with alternative facts today. In fact, we remain thankfully locked inside that bubble and outside the bubble on the Beltway that is turning 2017 into 1984. So hopefully we'll have a better discussion. It's interesting, I was interviewing Rush Holt, who's now the head of the AAAS, and he was a former congressman and his father was a senator from New Jersey and I asked him about the mood in Washington and his history in Washington, and he said one of the things we had discussed was that when he was a scientist, he was a physicist, when he was a scientist, facts meant everything and illusions meant nothing, perceptions meant nothing. When he went to Washington, it was just the opposite. Perception meant everything and facts meant nothing. So we had to adjust to that. But we haven't come here today to talk about politics. Thank goodness. But to remember and recall and think about Seymour Pappert. As Seymour said himself and you've looked at his biography, you can't think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something. And that's what we're going to be doing today. I really did not know Seymour personally, as many of you have, but our paths crossed many times in the 46 years I've been doing this. I've been covering science and technology and as I say, I'm really here to serve as the cat herder, get everybody out on time, remind people to put their cell phones on stun, things like that. And I'm hoping to interact with the lineup of speakers. We will have individual speeches and then we will have people talking in a group. Along the way, because we're doing a challenging year in public broadcasting, if it exists after this year, I will be hitting up everybody for grant money who I can, who comes up here. So without further ado, let's begin with the lead-off spot. I want to welcome Joey Ito, a Japanese activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, director of the MIT Media Lab, professor of practice of media arts and sciences at MIT. I know this because I read it all on his Wikipedia page. He's exploring new radical approaches to science and technology that can transform society in substantial and positive ways. He's chairman of the board of PureTech Health, a board member of Sony, the New York Times, the Knight of MacArthur Foundations. Boy, do we need to talk about grant money. So without further ado, welcome. Hi, good morning and welcome to the Media Lab. Actually, before I talk, I think there's a video that we're supposed to watch. So at MIT, we've given computers the power to turn motors, to make sounds, to draw pictures, and we've found ways of giving children the power to control the computer. So the child can make the computer do anything that he can describe in a suitable mathematical language by typing on a keyboard like this. Sometimes I get into bugs like this and it'll, when it was doing it in his mind, the little turtle, the little triangle thing was on an angle, so it drew the picture on an angle. So now I'll go back and have it draw it in its mind again while it's in the right position. And so the child doesn't have to be told by a teacher whether he's right or wrong. He can see for himself whether it works. That's what science and knowledge is about. Actually, remember the turtle that was my first software that I ever wrote. And so it dates me a little bit and I'm really nostalgic seeing it. But anyway, it's great to see so many people who have traveled, I think, a long way to get here. And I think it's a great tribute to Seymour and his work and the impact on children all over the world. And I was in Tokyo playing with the turtle and I still remember that. And I came to the lab six years ago and I was also fairly unconventional, I suppose. I was a two-time college dropout and I think it was quite a stretch for MIT to let me come in here. But when I got here, I realized I had actually found my tribe. The reason I kept dropping out was that I didn't really fit in the sort of traditional structured textbook learning method and that was what my sister calls an interest-driven learner. And when I got here, I realized that that was the DNA of this place and it really felt very, very comfortable for me. And as I got more immersed here and I started learning about the history of the lab and where this DNA came from, I realized that a lot of this can be attributed to Seymour as well as Marvin Minsky, both of whom we lost last year. And I think there's this sort of playfulness that both of them had that really still survives. And what's amazing about the lab is that 30 years later, it still has this sort of DNA locked in and is actually sort of expressing it just in different ways. And also, I think Seymour had this kind of activism that is also built into the lab and where we continue to have that in sort of this period in our country right now. It's sort of more important than ever and it's sort of manifesting in a very constructive, playful and interesting way. And we just had a talk yesterday by one of our researchers on that. But also, I think we also have to talk about a few weeks ago, Edith Ackerman, another lab faculty passed away. She was actually supposed to be on one of the panels, the Rethinking Schools panel, and she'd really been looking forward to it and so I think we'll miss her deeply and so wanted to mention that. But I think today's not a day for sort of looking back in eulogies and being sad. I think today is supposed to be to celebrate Seymour's ideas, look forward and think about how we can continue working on these ideas in the future. And so in this spirit, I'm also really excited to announce that with the help of MIT Press, the support of Seymour's family and MIT Libraries, we're making a digital version of Mindstorms available online as a PDF. But also, and that URL is mindstorms.media.mit.edu. But we're also going to be rolling it out on a platform also developed here at the media lab called PubPub, which will allow people to interact with the document in an interesting way. So we're sort of thinking about how to make books more interesting, interactive and playful. So look for that. And so I want to sort of shout out and give special thanks to Amy Brandt, the new director. She's not that new anymore, but the director of MIT Press who's here today and hopefully you'll get a chance to meet her. But anyway, we've got a very full program and it's credible slate of speakers who are going to be sharing their thoughts with us and really thank them for the generosity. So without further ado, I'd like to get the program underway and have welcoming remarks from Seymour's daughter Artemis Papert. Thank you. Hello everybody and welcome. I'd like first to thank the organizers of this event, the media lab, Kate and especially Nicholas and Mitchell for organizing such a wonderful event. It has barely started, but it looks like it is going to be a wonderful day. On behalf of Seymour's family, I'd like to welcome you all here today. I'd also like to welcome the people who have not been able to make it in person and who are watching us on live stream. Hello everybody out there. Being Seymour's daughter got me to meet a lot of interesting people. Many of you are here today. I'm looking forward to seeing you again for many, it has been many years. Hello again. Welcome. My first memories of being at MIT were from when I was 10 years old. I came to visit and Seymour was showing me computers. There was a whole floor filled with computers. The computers had the whole top floor just for themselves. And it was three or four computers taking the whole space with crazy air conditioning. And I was of course also shown logo. But then to me it seemed just commonplace. Seymour was showing it like, that's normal, what else? I didn't know any better. Seymour being the visionary that he was had the gift of making the extraordinary look like it was commonplace. It took only about 10, 20 years for it to really become commonplace. Seymour was predicting the future by inventing it. Thank you, Alan. Seymour had one favorite expression, now is the time. Let's get together, let's have a meeting, now is the time. Well, it looks like we do have a meeting. So now is the time. Maybe we could get together and think about something. Maybe we could think about thinking about Seymour. I hope you'll have an enjoyable day. Thank you. Ooh, we have music. Let's move on to the theme of the day today. And we're going to be about rethinking and thinking about Seymour. In the lead off spot, we've had Joey Eaton and we've had other speakers will be following. Now I want to move on to Nicholas Nacroponte. And I don't know, does anybody know who Nicholas is here? I mean, you wonder about how much you have to intro people. So I'll just say that these founder and chairman of the One Laptop for Child nonprofit organization and co-founder and director of the MIT Lab and the Jerome Wiesner Professor of Media Technologies. I mean, there's a lot more stuff to talk about, but we only have a certain amount of time and I have to put the rule to myself too. Nicholas, come on upstage here. Thank you very much. Is it the clicker? Sorry, here we go. Artemis, the part you didn't say about when Seymour says now is the time and then you schedule a time, he would invariably be late. Sometimes he would totally forget. And when he did come, whenever that was, he would debug the meeting in a nanosecond. He would sit there, say something, and then leave and you'd say, wow, it was worth waiting for. So what I'm going to do is tell you what I thought over the 50 years, actually a little later this year, will be my 50th anniversary of knowing Seymour very personally and as a friend more than as a colleague in the beginning. And all my life there were these big simple ideas that he would say and there was never an occasion to try and put them in one place, which is what I'm going to do today, because the Seymour you see on the screen is the Seymour at the day of the opening 32 years ago here at the Media Lab in a series of photographs taken by Marie Cassindus. And there were 20 of us at the time. It was a small number of faculty and not maybe 30 or 40 students, whereas today there's 750 people. It's grown enormously, grown most recently under Joey in ways that trust me, I could not be happier. Seymour and Marvin were, Seymour didn't know Joey, but Marvin did and was apprehensive. And then very enthusiastic. And we just see the playfulness that Joey talked about. This was another Seymour that I knew, because he always came in and talked to my class. I didn't like teaching as such. And so I got people to come into the class and give talks. And Seymour did it many times. And I'll derive some of my stories from that. And then in about 1982 we actually worked together. And Fatah Matasila is here. We'll talk today. This is a photograph from the time, 1982, I believe. And Seymour was bringing some of his ideas to the developing world. Now, what was so magical were, if you will, the riddles. Seymour talked in riddles. Or he'd ask questions. He'd ask a question like this to kids. How do giraffes sleep? Now think about it for a second. They've got such heavy bodies and these legs and this wood. How does it sleep? How does it get down? How does it get up? Does it lie down? And some child said, well, Seymour, the giraffe finds a tree with a little fork in it where it branches at the right height so it can go and put its head in the tree. And it sleeps on a wooden pillow. And the answers were always the part that Seymour enjoyed the most. And would ask other questions. I have three. This is the second. And he would ask, and adults wouldn't know the answers. If you look into a mirror and it makes left, right, why doesn't it make up down? Why aren't you upside down? And people would say, well, think of it. So those were the sorts of questions. And this was his favorite, at least the one he mused the most with me about, that if you have a car moving at 50 miles an hour and it's on wheels and it's going, what is the velocity of that point that's hitting the road? And obviously the answer is zero. But nobody would say, how could it be zero? It's going at 50 miles an hour and so on. So these were the sorts of things Seymour would say. And you'd go back and think about them at night. You would go back and think about not just it, but sort of it being sort of a metaphor for other things. So this was early on, way before the Media Lab. It was in the late 60s. I was teaching a course called, believe it or not, Architectural Geometry. And he would come and talk, as did Marvin, as did others, because it just was, to me, the most fun way to organize a class. And he told the class about something called the string and ring machine. And I was fascinated again, not by the literal story, but sort of the meaning. And the string and ring machine was a way of building a special purpose computer to solve a flavor of the so-called traveling salesman problem. And this flavor was, if you have many cities and their roads between the cities, and some are little windy roads, some are highways, and I think, what's the shortest distance or the shortest time, I should say, between the two random cities? And in the days when computation was a whole room, very much a whole room, it was a problem that people thought a little bit analogous to chess that you have to exhaustively search. And how would you do it? And Seymour told the class, what you do is you go out to the hardware store, and you buy these little rings that are for the cities, and then you go and buy a ball of string, and you connect the cities with little pieces of string whose length are proportional to the time it would take you to go from A to B. It's a windy road, a straight road, or a highway. And then you pick two cities and pull. And once you've pulled these rings, the first ones to get taught are, guess what, the shortest time between those cities. So it was a special purpose machine, a problem embodied in something physical. And this was just about the time that Seymour was doing. Logo had started it, the turtle was emerging, and he would talk in the concept of circle-ness. We learned circles with things like pi, and I mean, whatever the hell pi is, even as an adult, we don't quite know what pi is, where did it come from? We might be able to recite the number, might be able to recite it from a certain, but it's kind of abstract. Whereas when Seymour talked about circle-ness, he would invariably do this, and he would go around in a circle, and he would talk about circle-ness, and that was one kind of circle-ness, and it was sort of just an invitation to pop up a level. And he would constantly talk about mathland as this fictitious place like France that you could go to learn French, and that if you drop a kid in France, the kid learns French, and wow, that's abstract and people heard it thousands of times. This is over the years, but still today, 50 years later, what does the concept mean? So the big introduction, and this, for Seymour was starting, and certainly before 68, but was really coming together in 68, and that was to use computer programming as the best approximation we could come to thinking, and this is where thinking about thinking came from, the actual phrase thinking about thinking came from an introduction to a book he wrote for Warren McCulloch, a cyber-netician who's kind of fallen off the pages of history, but is certainly one of the most important second after Norbert Wiener in a period where that was very much a flourishing world. And Seymour taught us that if you could get a child to write a computer program, what they're doing is embodying thought, at least it's pretty close, and then even more important, since programs never worked the first time, that a child has to debug it by looking at the behavior on the screen. Using that to go back and edit the program, re-execute, maybe it still doesn't work, look at the behavior, and iterate. And wow, think about that. So simple and so common to everybody in this room. This was an approximation of learning because what you do is you iterate, you try, you experiment, you see, you converge, and so on. These ideas that were so powerful to use Seymour's word, he would always use or love to use the word powerful in front of an idea. And if he didn't like an idea, he might even say it's not a powerful idea. And it was powerful, it was very, very important. And the idea of getting kids to reinvent things. How many times were you told as a kid or as an adult don't reinvent the wheel? Huh? What a silly axiom. That's what you want kids to do. You want them to reinvent wheels and Seymour maybe never used that phrase exactly that way. Then the one that caught my attention, maybe didn't catch my attention until the early 80s, was the concept of recursion, which Seymour would talk about and remind many of us that we were all again told as kids never use a word in the definition of itself. That was a axiom that if you broke it, you were flunked. You couldn't use, that was so stupid, you don't use the word in the definition of the word. And yet recursion is where you use the word in the definition of the word. And it's so orthogonal to thinking. I just invented a little sort of program or at least this one would go on forever. But how do you draw a circle? Well, you draw a circle with three steps. You go forward some distance and you go right some distance and then you circle and it goes on and guess what, it makes a circle and kids would do this and then they would see if they made X too big, it might become a pentagram or something or that it would spiral around, not spiral but spiral around with little ends or it might be very, very smooth or it might be big, it might be small and guess what? They learned not just about circles and circleness, they engaged in the level of control. They had control, they were involved in that sort of thing. And the next, one of the next speakers will also, I'm sure Alan Kay will tell you about point of view because Seymour would say look, they've written a second and then two kids huddled around and one's point of view is God, look how beautiful those circles are and another one is say, yeah, look at how elegant my code is and each one would have a different view and that was also very important and you'll hear a lot about turtle graphics if they're newcomers in the room, which is very important but I do wonder, because I was slightly involved with it, if people remember how big the first turtle was, everybody except Danny Hillis and Alan Kay, should think about it because I know you guys know but the first turtle was the size of a child. It really was, it was this tall, okay and Seymour was working with five year old so they were roughly the same size and that was very important because when Seymour would do his little steps around in a circle and the kids you would see invariably in the class would do little steps around the curve and guess what, this robot would do its little steps around in a circle and the body language if you will of this early turtle was very fundamental. Disappeared a little bit when the turtle kind of became a bit more precious, so sort of a 12 inch diameter hemisphere and then became extremely abstract when it was just a little arrow on the screen. So 1982 was the first time we really worked together. So before that for the whatever 15 years before that we cooked together, that was our primary activity and then in 82 we got involved with basic sort of to summarize it to get to sort of look at the developing world as an opportunity to leapfrog some of the sort of development processes that the world had gone through where you build big roads and cement trucks and factories and then factories generate electricity and then it's a sort of a whole sort of heavy construct. Could there be a lighter way to leapfrog and it turns out that Senegal was one of the first places. We did that and you'll hear more about it today. Now in the years that followed, literally the 25 years that followed, computer programming fell off the table. We talk about millennials today. Do you know most millennials don't know how to write computer programs? They weren't taught them, it wasn't part of school. All of us back in the 60s were convinced that computer programming would be like spelling, of course everybody would do it and it would just, and it didn't. It went boop, disappeared. Why did it disappear? The reason it disappeared was not malice or plan or anything, the reason is that companies to realize that computer programming, amongst other things, could be the tool for them to make applications, call them that in today's lingo, make applications for you to use. They could make applications for kids to quote learn from, that they could in some sense or did in some sense hijack computer programming to then make the stuff and ship it back. It's as if they decided that they would be the scribes and they would be the people who could read and write and you would be able to read because they would publish books and so on. It really did fall off the table. It was kind of interesting to see it come back which had certainly done in the past decade and certainly in the past five years because it's come back in slightly the wrong way. And what do I mean by that? It's come back because people think their kids will get better jobs if they write computer programming. Sure, if you learn French you can be an interpreter into French perhaps, but that's not the reason to bring computer programming back. The reason to bring computer programming back is to guess what was on the screen before, think about thinking. And it's still not there because now we have a new sort of it's being hijacked for quote, we're gonna write programs and we're gonna all get jobs with Google because we've taken a one year course in computer programming. So when 25 years passed I spent those 25 years starting and building this place. It was then my turn to sort of when I stepped down and somebody came in, this was before Joey Ita, I got involved with doing this one laptop per child. I will not give you a one laptop per child lecture but we got hundreds of photographs per day from people we didn't know because there were three million laptops out there and people were just photographing and it's a very photogenic project obviously. Just look at that, look at that young girl. Look at the focus and attention that she had, the concentration and the normally school, whatever that means and we'll hear many flavors of it doesn't get you that way, doesn't capture you that way. And one thing that's cute about this photograph is her little baby brother is beside her. You can sort of hard to see that right away because there's another hat there. So she's not only intense but her brother is not only looking at the screen but is being affected by her intensity. And then this sort of scene, I just picked it out of a collection of hundreds of images is a school in rural India where the gentleman in the center had never been involved with computers but more importantly he had always run his class where corporate punishment was part of the curriculum. So he had a little whip and the kids would sit on these mats. You can see the yellow mats in the image which were usually in perfect lines and they were sitting perfectly spaced in lines and he would ask a question and all these little terrified kids were sitting there. No, but he wanted to answer the question and finally a little hand goes up and the question is slightly wrong. Swack! Little whip came out and that's literally the way he taught. And then the computers came, completely transformed the kids, the teacher. That was the transformation. That was a pepper change introduced into the most extreme form of rote learning that you could imagine. India is pretty extreme about rote learning and I'll talk about that later. So I wanna flash forward today because of Seymour's accident I did not have the chance over the last 10 years to talk about him, talk with him about today. And if he were in one of the, or at least looking at the congressional stuff to confirm the current secretary of education he would throw up. He would just say, this is not possible. We can't be going this medieval in education and there are these persistent issues which are now gonna come back and they're gonna come back and some of us including me and some certainly parents may accidentally be complicit by thinking well something is better than nothing or it could be so bad otherwise. But I tried to think what are some of the issues today? And I don't know how many times this has happened to you in life where you know you're right and everybody else is wrong or at least you're part of a small group. Doesn't that happen? It does happen. And there's certain things where you say why? I'll give you, actually I'll give you an unrelated one. Everybody today is talking about health insurance. You're gonna have 100% insurance. And I'm sitting there saying to myself what, health isn't about insurance. What do you mean insurance? That's like talking about education being insurance against ignorance. Health is free. It's something that the government provides. There's not some middle person who does insurance. That's what I can't. I was brought up in Europe, let's say half. It's not even a word that we unders. What do you mean insurance? We didn't have insurance. You got sick and you went to the doctor. So you look at these things and you say what's wrong with this picture? Well, I'll give you a couple that in education. Why are we still age segregating kids? Why? Montessori knew that wasn't right. A lot of people knew it wasn't right. Seymour and Marvin had this way of making it a little funny that seven year olds this year study with seven year olds and next year they get to study with eight year olds and it's sort of the sort of age segregation. We know it's wrong. Anybody who has a family with more than one child knows the kind of learning that goes on back and forth. So why are we stuck here? What's going on? The answer is it's the convenience of the testing system and hence the system really wants it and it's nothing to do with learning. Then this is one, I mean, I don't know. This is American so this is not anywhere else in the world. Try something. If you're in Europe or you have some European friends visiting you, tell them that education is funded by real estate taxes in the United States. They will look at you and say, no, no, you're joking. I said, no, it's serious. No, you can't be serious, you gotta be joking. And so you get things like that and then we take them for granted. It is the most obscene way to fund education and yet do you hear it come up? Do people push on it? Do people push on age segregation? Two things, right there, without looking very hard. And then I wanna talk a little bit about Finland and Korea. Now I'm not a great fan of test scores but they do tell you something perhaps and there's this test called PISA that is operated by the OECD that really looks at the, used to be just the OECD countries, it's a little bigger now, at the proficiency of the senior class, the 12th graders of the various countries and then ranks the countries. And people wanna be high on the rank because it says something. You're not 100% sure what it says but it's gotta say something. Finland used to be off the charts all by itself and Korea is sort of caught up and China's in there now and China's so big they get to divide themselves up and not be just China, they can now be cities and Singapore, Shanghai is one and Beijing's one and so China's multiple places but Finland always interested me enormously because in Finland, there's no testing kindergarten through 12th grade. There's no homework kindergarten through 12th grade. In Finland, it's the shortest number of days per year in school and the shortest number of hours per day in school. So you say, wait a moment. When we talk about education in this country, we add more homework. We want more hours of school. We're even gonna take play time out. We're gonna take recess out. We're gonna have more days the school doesn't, and then we have whole groups that specialize in doing more and more and more of what the Finns do less, less and less and they have these off the chart sort of results. And then you go to Korea and Korea is an extreme case of what we do here. Longer days, more hours of homework, more of this, more of that and you do enough of that, it can pay off. So here you have two totally different, totally orthogonal models of learning or education. I don't use the words interchangeably. In this case, perhaps it's okay. That totally different ones that are both at the top of the list. Now, Seymour was a Finn. He was from Finland as far as I heard. That was they learned from Seymour. They will tell you that today. They said, we learned that from America. We learned it from Seymour Papert. And what is the one thing they don't have? It is the disease of this country. Competition is a disease. It's not an asset. And what happens is the kids in Finland grow up with collaboration. That's how they learn. Parents in Finland, believe it or not, if there are any Finns, tell us at Coffee Break or if there are any Scandinavians, they don't boast with each other about their kids' grades because there aren't any grades or their test scores because there aren't any test scores, but it's also not in the culture. It's not in their culture. In our culture, it has become so mean-spirited. And what do we do as parents? We're complicit. We want our kids to go to Harvard and Yale. And so we feel, yes, well, then we've got to absolutely, basically kill them on the way and engage in this competition. And it's also a funny thing. Nobody wants to be the first to step back. They say, well, but wait a minute, if I step back and I become, if you will, like Finland, then I'm gonna compromise my child. And my child won't have the same chances. And so even though I believe what you and Seymour Papert and the Media Lab have said for years and years and years, I can't take that risk. My kid isn't gonna be a Joey Ito. So I've got to do it a different way. And it's kind of extraordinary. And stop testing. I have given lectures to these organizations that are for teachers and whatever it's called, the National Teachers Association. 4,000 people show up in this arena and you give your talk. And when I put up a slide that says, stop testing, I get a standing ovation. These teachers and headmasters stand up and start applauding. So it obviously means a lot more than does for me to put just the words there, but that doesn't mean you don't evaluate, you don't interact, and evaluation doesn't have to be a test. If I wanna know whether a child speaks English and understands it, the child can just spend, you know, like 60 seconds with you and you're gonna know 95% of their ability to speak and understand English. So you don't need a TOEFL test. You don't need to do it those way. So I will end with two provocative remarks because they're gonna become more and more important and we'll survive the four years as my friends in the UK say, at least you get a chance to vote again. So what's the worst thing that's happened to public schools? And the answer is private schools. Private schools have sucked out of the system not just the families who can afford it, but also in situations where the people who might, not just economically but intellectually be involved, the system gets more and more sucked dry. And the term charter school has gotten a little confused because five years ago it meant public school but of a specific kind. Now they're private charter schools, they're still public schools, they're called public schools, they're run privately. It's kind of a, let's leave them out of the discussion for a second because it's really taking sort of a particular problem like unions and dealing with it in a very specific way. But if we do not deeply believe that primary education is part of civic society and part of our responsibility, we are making a huge mistake. This is just gonna be a blip for the next few years but for life in the United States has not been good about that. We're not good about civic society. We're not good in many of the things you can call it socialist but and maybe I am a socialist in some way but it's in look at these stupid lists about the most productive country, the happiest country, the highest earning countries. These lists go and look at the top 10 countries, seven of them are socialist, usually the top seven. So you say, wow, there is a correlation. So I'll end with something that is obvious, I would say it and Seymour would say it to heads of state and they would say, wow, I never thought about that. Yes, very, very important. And one of the themes that I hope you keep in the back of your mind today is that Seymour was intrinsically global. He was global to his bones, not just because he grew up in South Africa and was educated in England but and worked with Peugeot and Geneva but he was just a global thinker. And the reason that's important is that the United States and all due respect to ourselves, we are a rounding error. It turns out we are literally a rounding area. Today, the world's population depends how you count it, what week, what day is 7.35 billion. And guess what, the United States is 0.35 billion. So we are literally the right of the decimal point. And what we do here is important because people look at it but let's remember the rest of the world because Seymour would. Thank you very much. That was terrific. I knew we can't get through this without mentioning politics somewhere along the line. Stepping up to the plate next is Mitch Resnick. I heard as we were discussing before that Mitch Resnick doesn't like to take credit for hardly anything he does. He's one of the most modest people in the room and this is a big room. And he is Lego Papert Professor of Learning Research at the Media Lab. And he develops new technologies and activities to engage kids. So let him come up and tell you more about Mitch Resnick. Come on up, Mitch. So it was great spending time out in the main area just interacting with people with lots of flashbacks and it's just amazing to see people with so many different connections to Seymour of people spanning time from across many different decades and spanning geography from all different parts of the world and spanning disciplines from Seymour's many different areas and fields of expertise and interest. And I think it's so clear just talking to the people here today how Seymour's ideas influenced and inspired so many people in so many ways. And I know that all of us as we gather together really want to find ways we believe so deeply and care so deeply about Seymour's ideas wanting to find ways to make sure those ideas live on even if Seymour is no longer with us. So as I thought as I was planning my presentation it was worth thinking about what are the ways that we can help support the spread of Seymour's ideas so that they can continue to influence and inspire people around the world inspiring children and teachers and parents and researchers. As I started thinking about how to frame those ideas the first phrase that came to mind was putting Pappert into practice. I have a weakness for alliteration so putting Pappert into practice. But as I said it didn't feel right. Otherwise Seymour wouldn't like that. It's too simplistic to think you can take someone's ideas and just put them into practice. Seymour is always skeptical of that type of top down linear thinking. I think Seymour had a much more organic view of teaching and learning and a more organic view of how ideas spread in the world. It's not like an engineering process of building a structure according to specifications. It's much more like a gardener or a farmer tending to plants of creating the conditions under which the plants can thrive. So as I thought about that another phrase came to mind another alliterative phrase. The seeds that Seymour sowed. The seeds that Seymour sowed. And to me that felt better. That felt that was more in Seymour's spirit. Because when I think of Seymour he was always planting new ideas, new seeds. And some of them were mathematical ideas. Some were pedagogical ideas. Some were technological ideas. Some were epistemological ideas. Some of the ideas and some of the seeds spread like wildflower around the world. Some of the seeds took root in some places and not others. Some of the seeds took root in some people and not others. Some of them remained dormant in the ground waiting for other people to nurture the seeds and find the right conditions in which they can thrive. So in thinking about these seeds that Seymour sowed I wanna share a story about some of those seeds and how they started to take root. It's a story of a 10 year old boy who was involved in a workshop we were doing here at MIT back in 1985, more than 30 years ago. And it was one of our first Lego logo workshops where the children were using Seymour's logo programming language to control creations that they built out of Lego bricks. So I have a video here, about a minute video that highlights a Lego logo project that this 10 year old boy Nicky was working on. And the video starts with Nicky talking to Seymour about the project. Six by three inches and the motor wasn't packed out. And then when I put it on the table and turned it on to see if it would vibrate and move it busted apart into about like 15 pieces. I decided to make it smaller. So I made it smaller and now it works fine. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Look at it. So when Nicky started working on that project, he started out with the intention of building a car and he built a motor on to it and he connected it to the computer and with this new connection with the computer he typed commands to try and make the car moved and it went forward a little bit but then the motor sort of became uncoupled. It sort of broke off of the car and started vibrating across the table on its own. And Nicky became really fascinated with his vibration. So he started playing around and experimenting with his vibration and he started thinking maybe I could use these vibrations for making something move. So he started thought about making his vibrating machine and he put a platform, used some Lego axles as legs put a motor on top and he turned it off from the computer and it sort of like stayed in place. It wasn't doing much. And he felt he had to amplify the vibrations. And he then drew upon some personal experience. He enjoyed skateboarding and he remembered that when he went skateboarding if he whipped his arms around it would push him forward. So he thought maybe he could use that same idea. So he built an arm coming out of the motor figuring if it whipped around would amplify the vibrations and make it move and in fact that worked. And he was very pleased with it and he then even found that he could start steering his vibrating machine. When the motor turned one way it went forward into the right. When the motor went the other way it went forward into the left. So we could steer it with controlling the direction of the motor. And he even put a light sensor on and started playing with seeing if it could follow the light based on what the light sensor did to turn the motor this way and that way. So as I think about this story I think you can see a few examples of some of the seeds that seem more sowed. For me an important element of this story is that Nicky was given the time and the encouragement to follow his interests and his curiosity. He wasn't given a specific task to solve or a challenge to solve. And I think Seymour recognized it was important for children not just to be able to answer questions but to ask their own questions to come up with their own projects. And that was one of the seeds that Seymour sowed. And when the motor broke off from the car and started vibrating and some field might have seen as a failure Seymour and others at the workshop encouraged Nicky not to see it as a failure but to see it as an opportunity for exploration. But I think Seymour understood a lot of the best learning experiences would come when people were actively engaged in experimenting, trying new things, being, taking advantage of the unexpected when it happened. That was another one of the seeds that Seymour sowed. And when Nicky needed to amplify the vibrations and he drew upon his personal experience as a skateboarder it was similar to the way a lot of children as they learned turtle graphics would use their own body knowledge when Nicholas was showing before with making the circle and drawing on their knowledge of the body so that Seymour would call body-syntonic learning. And that was another seed that Seymour sowed. And when Nicky was then programming those vibrating machines to try to follow the light who was exploring ideas about feedback and sensing and control ideas that previously were totally inaccessible to elementary school students. And those too were ideas that Seymour sowed. Looking back at this from a 2017 lens we probably, you know, people would describe Nicky as a maker and a coder engaging in computational thinking. Of course in 1985, few people were talking about making or coding or computational thinking and nobody was talking about a maker movement or a coding movement. But Seymour back then in 1985 was already laying the intellectual foundations for those movements or you might say sowing the seeds for those movements. And in many ways I think it's fair to see Seymour as like the intellectual godfather and the patron saint of those current day movements. Now if that doesn't mean, you know, although those movements have embraced, have carried on Seymour's ideas and Seymour's seeds are bearing fruit and that I think if you look around there are more kids in more places with more opportunities to experiment and explore and express themselves with technology and building on Seymour's ideas. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that Seymour would embrace all of the activities that you would see today that are around making and coding and computational thinking, far from it. The same way he didn't embrace a lot of the things he saw happening with logos. Seymour was really frustrated with the way that in so many places kids would draw a square, draw a triangle and that was the end of their logo experience and they never really engaged with the powerful ideas and the thinking about thinking that Nicholas was talking about. And I think Seymour saw that even as logos spread around the world, oftentimes the ideas got diluted. Seymour even coined the term epistemological dilution to talk about this process. And in the year 2000, 20 years after the publication was booked, Mindstorms, Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas, Seymour complained that in those 20 years people had paid a lot of attention to the first two words of the subtitle, Children, Computers, they seemed to have forgotten about the third one, Powerful Ideas. So I think that Seymour would probably have a lot of the same type of complaints about a lot of the things that you see today under the banner of making and coding and computational thinking, even as the technologies are proliferated and their work is making and coding as Nicholas was referring to earlier, a lot of times their powerful ideas are missing. Now, I don't think, in my mind, the reason that's happened, I don't think it's because of a problem with the powerful ideas or the seeds. To me, it's a reflection of the challenges of creating the environment where those seeds can take root and flourish. So I think one of the big challenges that faces is how can we create those right conditions to make sure that those seeds that Seymour sowed are able to take root and flourish. Actually, here at the Media Lab, as we think about ways of extending and supporting the spread of Seymour's ideas, we sometimes think about it in terms of four core ideas that are captured in the four words, projects, passion, peers, and play. More alliteration. I think for us, we're always looking to see what are the ways that we're able to provide opportunities for children to create their own projects in collaboration with peers based on their own passions in a playful spirit. Let me say a few words about each of those peas and about how they align with Seymour's ideas and how we've been inspired by Seymour in thinking in these ways. So the first P is projects. Now if you talked a lot of math and science educators, they talk a lot about problem solving. And Seymour, very provocatively, would argue for projects over problems. And that doesn't mean Seymour was opposed to problem solving. Of course, he thought problem solving was important, but he felt that problem solving needed to come in a way that in the process of kids being engaged in meaningful projects, that Seymour was not just interested in kids understanding an idea, but being able to use the idea to be able to express themselves with the idea of becoming fluent with an idea. And he knew the projects were the best way to make that happen. Or the second P, passion. You know, in the forward to mind storms, Seymour tells the story of his fascination with childhood gears and how that opened up ways for him to start exploring mathematical concepts. But for me, the most memorable and important line in that forward is when Seymour wrote, I fell in love with the gears. Because Seymour realized that people are gonna, that people are gonna learn most effectively when they're working on things they care deeply about. That when people are working on things they really care about, that they'll work longer and harder and they'll make deeper connections to the ideas that are involved. I've always loved Seymour had another quote where he said, education is not about explanation. It has to do with engagement, with falling in love with the material. And for me that's one of Seymour's most important seeds. So we have projects and passion and the third P is peers. Later on in mind storms near the end of the book and the chapter images of the learning society, Seymour talks about going to Brazil and visiting the Samba schools where people come together to create the dance and music routines for the annual carnival. And what intrigued Seymour the most was the way that the Samba schools brought together people of all different ages and all different levels of expertise as Nicholas was talking about. And I think that we see that with that type coming together of people in new ways, Seymour saw that it was the power of pure-based learning and he saw that as a core to what his image was of the learning society. The fourth P is play. And I think I sometimes call this the most misunderstood P because people sometimes associate just with laughter and fun and although those can be important for Seymour, Seymour saw that play was about taking risks, trying new things, experimenting. He sometimes talked about hard fun and Seymour didn't just support playing hard fun for kids, he really lived it himself. Seymour was always playing with ideas, wrestling with ideas, experimenting with ideas. I never met anybody who's at once so playful and serious with ideas at the same time. So projects, passion, peers and play, for me, those are four of the most important seeds that Seymour sowed and we always keep them in mind. And now in my group, when we work on a new technology or a new activity, we're always thinking about how we can keep in mind those four P's so we stay aligned with Seymour's ideas. I think our Scratch project has been successful because it's grounded in Seymour's ideas of the four P's that unlike a lot of other coding initiatives where kids present puzzles to solve, scratch, engage as kids and work on projects they care about rather than solving puzzles. And the second thing, kids are based on their own passion, that there's a wide range of different types of projects they can do based on their own things they care about most deeply. Kids work with peers, learning with them from one another, it's much like in the Samba School and they develop things in a playful spirit. So as I thought about in these ideas, I gave a talk a couple of years ago where I was talking about how these ideas about our Scratch project and at the end, during the question and answer period, someone stood up and asked during the question and answer period in a rather aggressive tone, wasn't Seymour Popper doing these ideas 20 years ago? He meant it as a criticism, I took it as a compliment and I said yes. And I think all the ideas we're working on are all inspired by Seymour's ideas and I take pride, no shame in doing that. And I think I fell in love with Seymour's ideas 30 years ago, I never fell out of love with Seymour's ideas. Seymour's ideas continue to provide a vision for the type of society that I, the type of world I wanna live in. And I know in an audience like this, I'm not alone. I know many of you feel the same way just as deeply, just as strongly. We believe in the power of Seymour's ideas. We also know how difficult it is for them to take root. We know that it's gonna take all of us, efforts from all of us and many others for them to take root. So I'll close just with my hope that we can use an event like this as an occasion for all of us to recommit and rededicate ourselves each in our own way to nurturing the seeds that Seymour sowed. Thank you. I don't learn by having somebody teach me. Sometimes I might fill in a little gap here and there, but if I wanna learn something, I go out and I try to undertake a project. I try to see what different people have said and get involved in a debate about it. The same thing applies to children. I'd like them to be able to acquire ideas by using them, by using them to make something, to achieve a purpose, to achieve a project. And in doing this, they are not simply banking in their vaults of their heads, ideas that somebody else has pre-digested for them, they reinvent the ideas as they use them. Our next panel is something totally different. It's a panel, not a speaker. And so I'm gonna invite our panelists to come out up here. We're gonna be talking about rethinking making and while they're coming up, and I was seeing the word rethinking and I was trying to remember where, how did the re-part get part of thinking? And I remembered a conversation I had with a scientist years ago, and he said, do you know where the word research comes from? I said, no, he says, well, when you have a new idea and you wanna figure something out, you search for the answer and you search and you search until you find something. But of course, once you find it, that's not good enough, it has to be researched. So research means a process of going over and over again and figuring out if it still holds up to scrutiny. Now our panel about rethinking, and instead of me introducing the panelists and trying to stumble my way through an introduction about their credentials, I'm gonna have the panelists introduce themselves. So let's start on the end and work your way down. Surprise, surprise. Are we doing a little bit of intro or just... No, you can first introduce yourself and then you can do your intro. Okay, I'm Gary Steger. I'm Karen Wilkinson. You don't wanna say anything about... Okay. I have Brian Silverman. Dale Doherty. Okay, Dale Doherty. Now you can do your one minute. Ah, I sat on the end so I can go last. But thanks, it's a great honor to be here and to be in the room with so many great old friends and people who've inspired me over the last 35 or so years. In my recent book Invent to Learn, we dedicated the book to Seymour because we assert that he's the father of the modern maker movement. And although some people think I was a student of Seymour's I have something in common with Joey. I was actually rejected by the Media Lab twice while working with Seymour to be a student. But I was always his colleague and I was a teacher who spent the last three and a half decades trying to bring Seymour's powerful ideas to life in schools around the world. For the purposes of this panel, I think most important is the fact that I was the principal investigator on one of Seymour's last major institutional research projects which was the work we did together along with David Cavallo and John Stetson in creating an alternative multi-age constructionist alternative learning environment inside a prison for teenagers in Maine. And in that case, long before anyone was using the term maker space, we weren't merely adding a maker space to a school. We were reinventing school as a maker space. So our students who had been written off as dysfunctional and dangerous and illiterate in many cases, stupid were given five hours a day uninterrupted to work on personally meaningful projects and they were able to engage in all sorts of remarkable work. There's lots of stories I could share about that research but the one data point that I think is interesting is that in over three years we didn't have a single kid who had to leave the classroom for discipline reasons. And in our mobile classroom, which was just a trailer, there was nothing special. We had a computer for kid, a dark room, lots of tools, Lego, a library stock with high interest reading materials, kids made computer programs, movies, newspapers, robots, airplanes, photographs, guitars and a lot more. We were really trying to put into practice, Seymour's idea that we want kids to be historians rather than being taught history, to be mathematicians rather than being taught math. And it's important to recognize that we situated that work in the progressive education traditions of people like John Dewey and Lars Malakutzi and Herb Cole. Some of our students even corresponded with Jonathan Kozel. One of the through lines of Seymour's work that doesn't get enough mention is the commitment to social justice and the fact that so many of its projects as Nicholas alluded to earlier were with children and parts of society that the privilege don't give a lot of care or thought to. And in the work that Seymour and I did together in Maine he was quite explicit in saying that we were trying to create a learning environment that the best private schools would be jealous of. Ironically, a lot of the privileged educators who have seen the work since, have read what we wrote about it, have said things like, well, you had lots of freedom. Which is particularly ironic, given that we were in a prison context and Amnesty International was accusing of torturing children. That was one of those sort of paradoxes that Seymour loved to play with. One thing that I've made since then that was inspired by lots of conversations with Seymour came out of discussions about how come so many of our progressive education friends say such ridiculous things when it comes to modernity, when it comes to technology and computing. And can't we get them in a room together and show them what's possible? How what we do with computers is wholly consistent with the best principles of progressive education and child development. And so, I've created the Constructing Modern Knowledge Summer Institute that's this year celebrating its 10th anniversary, rooted in that idea of building a bridge between the educational technology community that gives almost no thought to powerful ideas or learning. And a progressive education committee who has never recognized that what we're talking about doing with computers is wholly consistent with their life's work. One big idea that I'd like to share about Seymour that also doesn't get enough discussion is that although he was a great critic of school, he never gave up on schools because that's where the kids were. And in fact, most of his research was done in schools. And I can tell you, I saw Seymour teaching children. I saw the kind of bond he was able to form with kids that most people wouldn't spend any time with. And he had your destiny to believe that teachers could be better. He worked with teachers, he believed in teachers, he created the tools that would allow teachers to see through the eyes and the hands and the screens of their kids what was possible to rekindle a fire in them that would help them create the conditions for powerful ideas to grow. A couple lessons I wanted to just end on. One is when we were thinking about what kinds of activities to engage kids in or more broadly, if you will, the notion of curriculum, Seymour would ask, what can they do with that? Meaning how can they put those ideas into use in order to approximate a more powerful idea? He would say things like, there's no reason to do it unless it leads to the potential for kids to engage in some powerful thinking. He used to say that schools teach at best a billionth of a percent of the knowledge that's in the universe, yet we quibble endlessly over which billionth of a percent is important. And in our work in Maine, he suggested that every time the system thought and understood what we were doing, we should have done something more radical. That if you want to move the system along, you have to keep the rope tight, that you have to keep pulling. And one of the things we learned together was that the children in this context wouldn't tolerate more than a minute or two of instruction. They had been severely damaged by their schooling experiences. And it turned out there's almost never a time where you need to provide more than a minute or two of instruction. You can introduce some ideas, show the kids some technique, and then ask them to do something with it. A couple quick anecdotes that I think really celebrates Seymour. The prison was about three hours from Seymour's home. We would start school about nine o'clock in the morning. And Seymour would often arrive with a Lego robot that he had built. And he would say things like, I made this on the way down. It had to have been at least 50% of the time he was doing it while driving. It was never clear how he made it otherwise. And I'll never forget one day, early on in the project, it was incredibly stressful. Teachings exhausting under the best conditions. We were in the worst conditions. It was the end of the week. I just wanted to take a nap and watch cartoons all weekend. And Seymour came up to me at the end of the day and said, do you have any plans for tonight? And he didn't turn Seymour down. This was already a day where he had climbed in the window of the house. He had driven into a tree. He had forgotten that Suzanne was waiting for him at the airport. But I said, he said, do you have any plans for this evening? I said, well, what do you have in mind Seymour? And he said, I was thinking we could go out for a really nice dinner and continue that conversation about changing the world. Yeah, it's a good story. Very nice. Karen directs the tinkering studio at the Exploratorium. Since you guys won't tell what you do, I have to fill in something for the people. I'm a teacher educator. But they do, okay? Thanks. Go ahead. So I want to, Gary and Brian probably represent one end of the spectrum of time spent with Seymour, but I'm here to really show that just a tiny exposure to his ideas can go a really long way. I feel like if I'm trying to work with the seed analogy, to me, Seymour's ideas were really like a trickle of a rainstorm that began and ended up being a torrent. But I'll kind of try to paint a picture quickly of what I mean by that. Before I even learned about Seymour, I was an environmental designer, really interested in learning spaces, but not the kinds that happened in school. So I got a job in a museum and ironically the very first project I worked on was to work with a school. And it was given a detention center. I don't know if there's a theme here with jails and detention centers, but it was to take an old detention center and turn it into a space where kids were supposed to engage with ideas around science. And we really, Mike and I, my partner at the time, were really wanting kids to play with ideas. We were really, I would say, very uninformed and going on gut instinct at this point, but wanting it to involve not just science, but art and technology. So they gave us free access to the storage closets at the museum and at this school and we pilfered anything we could find. And one of the things that we found, so lots and lots of gear and old electronics and equipment, but one of the things that we found was an old Apple computer and two boxes of Lego logo stuff. So we filled this room with activities and the idea was to engage kids and groups, different age levels in stuff and playing with these ideas. And the thing that struck us so much was that one area where the Lego logo stuff was going on seemed to capture kids' imagination in a way that building with blocks or building with some of the other components, I mean, we had earthworm bins and physical science things and chemistry, but there were some similarities, but there was this beautiful bridge between the physical and the digital that happened there. So not knowing anything about the whole, the heft of all the history that went along with that, we started to ask questions and we had a visit from Natalie Rusk who said, you might wanna check out these things that are happening at the Media Lab. There's this group called Epistemology and Learning at the time and shared a book, Mindstorms, and we started reading, asking questions, eventually hooked up with the Lifelong Kindergarten Group to and have continued that work with Mitchell and his students, but really fell in love with both the approach, the belief, the ideas, constructionism, and what that meant to really build and construct with things, both on the screen and in the real world, but that it was human. There was a passion behind those things that really resonated with us at a deep level. So came out here and spent some time and then since then have gone back into museums again at the Exploratorium, but I think the reason I fell in love with it also troubles me now and I think Nicholas and Mitchell alluded to this, this idea of computational thinking that Seymour coined in the 80s, it's been one of those dormant ideas that now has come roaring back, Silicon Valley is in love with it, they're all sorts of funders, parents, they want their kids exposed to it, but I would say it's not for the reasons that Seymour envisions, it's a paler version of his ideas and it teaches computational thinking as kind of a rubric that you're checking off a certain set of skills and I think his original vision, of course I love tinkering and I see this place filled with tinkers and people who play with ideas, I think of it more as computational tinkering that he was aiming for, so I'd like us to do what we can together, collectively, for people to really see the original intention and rethink the way computational thinking is approached. Let's see if we can get into it a little more, Gary, do you want a brief summary? Yeah, a really brief summary, so let me follow on a little bit with what Mitchell was saying about sewing seeds and one of the things about Seymour is he sewed a lot of them and I think that one of the things that I'd like to point out to people, here's the suggestion rather than a story is there's a particular little corner of what Seymour did that was very, very inspiring to me and the particular corner, interestingly enough, was the video that we saw earlier of Seymour acting like he was this crazy guy where in the period that he made that video he was writing a collection of papers that were the earliest papers of the Logo Lab. One of the papers, and they're all online, strongly suggest that you look at it, is the third Logo memo co-authored, Seymour was a co-author and it was called 20 Things to Do with a Computer and yeah, it's Cynthia. In 20 Things to Do with a Computer he plays out in greater detail the thing that we saw in that video is using computers not just to extract square roots but to use control motors to make music to write concrete poetry. The paper that he wrote before it, the second Logo memo was called Teaching Children Thinking and in that memo, Mitchell if you were talking about a crisp statement of what Seymour's ideas were, it's a good read because his ideas evolved in a lot of different ways since then but he says very concisely in the first few pages that memo is along with Dewey and Montessori and Piaget he thinks that children learn best by doing things and by thinking about the things that they're doing and us as materials designers, our job is to make better things for kids to do and to make better ways for kids to be thinking about them. What a great segue to the making things to do, Dale Doherty. Yeah. Well, I didn't know Seymour personally, I didn't go to Media Lab or MIT. I think in many ways what I was doing was rediscovering in people that were doing really interesting things what I'd call playing with technology and try to put that together. I was interested in what they were doing, how they were doing it and why they were doing it and in many ways that leads to a story as if you met a chef who created a certain dish you'd want to know what the recipe was behind it and why they came up with it and so that led to Make Magazine and in our first issue called People Makers that would read that issue and later started Maker Faire to celebrate the people that were coming to do this. And because we made Maker Faire at families we got lots of kids coming and lots of teachers coming and there was curiosity about why can't we do this in school? I'd get to worrying like what is the experience of a young person coming to Maker Faire on the Monday after Maker Faire? What do they do if they want to become makers? Where do they go? How do they learn this? And one of the qualities I saw in the people that early on makers they were self-directed learners they were playful almost to use Mitch's terminology they were passionate about what they were doing and they didn't really need another reason to do something they were curious and interested. We have a story in the current issue of the magazine about a man that builds a boat he covers it in solar panels so it has its own power and he makes it autonomous it's an eight-foot boat he brings it to Maker Faire last May and shares it with people and talks about it inside it has a lot of electronics built from homemade it's a homemade boat in his garage it's made from cheap components a couple weeks after Maker Faire he puts it in the Half Moon Bay and he's programmed it to go to Hawaii and 41 days later and 2400 miles later he goes to Hawaii himself and watches his boat come into a harbor on the Big Island and he says I didn't do this for the money or the competition I did it for the challenge and it took him 30 months he thought it would take him just a little time it consumed his family's time he found people to help him as peers and it opened a world to him he actually took the boat from Hawaii and said I'm too cheap to put it in the mail and send it back home I'm going to reprogram it for New Zealand but it's that curiosity and exploration that I think is grounds this and why do people do these things but when I particularly started getting questions from educators about the value of making I felt I had to go back and understand why they were even asking that question because to me it was obvious it was obvious people were learning and creating things and doing things not because they wanted a grade or not because they wanted a career but because they were passionate about it and that's how I encountered Seymour Papert's ideas and Piaget and Bump4M, Dewey and Montessori that they understood this and they actually helped me explain it to other people and what I would say is I think they're both describing or all of them are describing something that's natural in human beings and somehow our systems really don't seem to recognize it we're concerned about other things and not about how we learn and why we're motivated to learn and to do the kinds of things and make things Do you think that there are people who get it and then people no matter what you say to them just they're never gonna get it the idea of maker and making things and that kind of... I have to say, you know there's two sides of that I was overwhelmed by how immediately people got it right and it seemed to resonate in something that's human in us and I kind of used the phrase to see ourselves as producers, not just consumers and we're being defined as consumers all the time but if you want to talk about kids and other things what are they going to do? What do they get to do? What can they do with the things around them? But I don't feel like we reach everybody and other people dismiss it and this is again why Papert's... because I think you can look at this stuff and say, oh, he made a boat so what, you know, that didn't change the world and or that's this trivial playing with electronics or 3D printers but I think when you actually focus on what's happening inside that person it's almost like we talk about religion there's something happening in them that's happening in the world to change the world at the same time and the two go together Yeah, I mean you have to I think Seymour talked about it that you have to create the conditions you're all shaking, you're nodding if you want to talk for an invention to have No, I think that particular quote I think is the thing I've been chasing after all these years it is whether you're building on the screen or the physical environment or both like how do you create those conditions to give kids, learners of all ages really the opportunity to construct for themselves and not be sort of led step by step through things Yeah Yeah, yeah It's funny, let me say something that I'm sure you'll respond to this you ask, do people get it? Gary runs Constructing Modern Knowledge every year we go there there are a bunch of adult teachers who actually do get it but it takes me about a day and a half to realize that they're allowed to They're allowed to and Yeah, and every year they invent things that a few years ago would have earned them an engineering degree and with no instruction but with a culture of people to support them and rich materials to think with and time that makes it possible for them to invent But the day and a half is when teachers arrive there they sort of ask the question what am I supposed to do? And Well, you know Gary says whatever Well, that's interesting you bring that up about something I was thinking about because we teach kids and we live in a society where failure is not an option and when you are experimenting and you're tinkering failure is always an option and scientists, scientists built on failure but we don't ever talk about how it's okay to do something wrong and to learn from it Well, one of the things that we do at Constructing Modern Knowledge is try to create the conditions by which teachers have this experience of being a learner again so that they can then think about what it means as it to be a teacher in this era and as Brian said we go through this emotional arc each year where the end of the first day people are freaking out and they say, I can't do this, I'm not smart and the second morning people disappear we lose a few every year and we tell them if you can make it to lunch on the second day you're going to see everything is going to start to fall into place and then it's downhill and they can't believe what they accomplished and one woman a couple of years ago told us I packed a car it was ready to leave the second morning I went to get a cup of coffee before I drove off and just as I took the sip of coffee the solution to our bug came to me and I threw the coffee down and I ran back to the group and they said we missed you we were worried about you and she said well I didn't feel like anything was going to be accomplished and I felt stupid and I didn't know if I liked all you people and but look what we accomplished together we made this amazing project that we never imagined would have been possible before and we said oh that's a fantastic lesson she said that's not the moral of the story the moral of the story is when do my students get to get a cup of coffee when we're telling them to stay on task and we have to cover curriculum because we don't have the courage or the ability or will to edit a morbidly obese curriculum yeah guys commenting on your comment about failure not being an option this is actually also building on something Karen said is when we're talking about computational thinking one of the issues for me at least and this may I don't know who agrees with this is a lot of the people who are talking about computational thinking are basing it on computer science and when Seymour was talking about computational thinking he was basing it on computer craft what does that mean? what the main difference is is computer science is get it right computer craft is don't matter you get become really good at debugging right and you can't you can't remediate the term failure in schools people who say we need to teach children about failure failure has so much negative baggage associated with it that there's no way to turn it into anything positive you can't motivate and threaten with the same term Seymour said in a document that he created for our project that you can't get it right without getting it wrong which the kids really liked and he also said in keeping with some of the ideas that Dale expressed that he used to quote Xenophon a lot that nothing beautiful is forced what Dale? you know I visited Makerspace down in Texas and at an engineering design program and they said they created it specifically so that their students had a place to fail that they were choosing projects that were safe to get the grade in the class and to innovate to do new things it's a bit like baseball you fail at it more than you succeed and I think we have to provide both the time and the place to try things and most of them will be failures but you begin to own this process yourself and I think the thing I'd like to add on is I feel like the maker movement and particularly in education is finding lots of really good allies and people are getting it even though there isn't like a doctrine to this or one way of looking at it whether it's Pappert or someone else I don't know it's about getting it right I think it's for them even just trying things and encouraging them and there's a real hunger out there because almost like Rapanti was saying they know that the current system is failing kids that they're not engaging them that kids are not going to be creative and innovative by following a standardized curriculum you know the maker movement first robotics things like that they work, people work together kids work together as a team where everything else they're working singling and resourcefulness with ideas and how to use each other for those things I mean to me failure we need to switch up the narrative on mistakes mistakes are ways to get more information it's like the debugging process it's funny though because it's saying the same thing but saying it with different words it's not a space for failure it's an opportunity for debugging you wanted to say something yeah I mean as we've heard today Seymour is quite a reverend and would play with some of these ideas I remember in the 1980s when cooperative learning was all the rage in schools Seymour was asked a question in a magazine which I'm sure they considered a softball they said well what do you think of cooperative learning and he said I think it's a profoundly bad idea to force children to work together and that there should be some benefit from working together nothing beautiful is forced and in keeping with Mitchell's idea of projects Seymour said that the best projects push up against the persistence of reality that if you think about them that way you don't have to worry about failure or right or wrong but something works it doesn't work if it works you're inspired to embellish to test a larger hypothesis to decorate to improve if it doesn't work you engage in some debugging processes he also talked about that kids should work on stuff they care about right I mean whoever gets a kid what do you want to work on and come up with your own ideas so the big idea that was expressed in his attitude towards computers was you know it was empowering the student to be in control of something and really asking that basic question who's in control I've seen teachers get up there and lead a making session where they said don't open the bag of parts until I tell you to it's like a standardized test so they're all rigidly going to follow the steps that's all them I think we have to trust kids to be creative and expect them that they're wired that way to do these things and to give them both the time and the place to do that you know our friend Edith Ackerman who's sadly not with us today said a year or two ago that making is a way of seeing it's a way of viewing the world and in the case of kids making gives them the confidence and competence to recognize that they can solve any challenge they encounter even if only to learn that there's a whole lot more they need to learn on that note we're going to take a break but Karen you have speaking of a project you have a project for all of us yeah so what I'd like to do over the break and the breaks to follow lunch and even the reception this evening I want to invite you to play along with us with three things that seem more cared about gears, computation and playfulness just itself we've got an activity that we've brought it's a very rough prototype so we were a little bit nervous about bringing but this seems like an appropriate place to do that but we have something to share with you that's actually a collaboration between the Exploratorium Lifelong Kindergarten Group and the Idea Studio in Billund so we invite you to play along with us two second invitation as well I've been in my spare time collecting, see more speeches and articles and getting a lot of video transcribed that wouldn't exist otherwise and you can find it all at dailypapert.com and there's little boxes on the chairs is that part of the project yeah you can build, see more writing I think those little boxes have little Lego things in there and help build the project thank you all we're going to take a quick break come back in about half hour you can all get caffeinated and be rejuvenated alright presented for your consumption as Rod Serling used to say our next segment, beginning with a video when I was two I was already fascinated by rotating things wheels, gears, pulleys I loved their beauty I loved their logic I thought about how fast small ones drive slow big ones I had no idea I was preparing myself to become a mathematician but I was when teachers talk about ratio and about equations most children find these ideas abstract alien I did not my world of rotations made them concrete friendly for me, gears and wheels had become objects to think with wow that was a close encounter of the you didn't hear the music you didn't hear the music one of the great movies it's my pleasure to introduce our next guest and you know you live in town here she's absolutely familiar to everybody Sherry Turkle professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT yeah you can applaud if you want absolutely I'm a little confused because she you know she has a seminal book that she wrote with Seymour called Reclaiming Conversation the power of talk at a digital well no it's the wrong one Epistemological Pluralism and the re-evaluation the re-evaluation of the concrete I wasn't sure if that's a civil engineering book concrete no it's a paper it was a paper in women's studies in a women's studies journal called Science it's a cognoscenty crowd author of Reclaiming Conversation the power of talk in a digital age Sherry, Dr. Sherry Turkle thinking about objects many of us today can't think about thinking without thinking about Seymour and so to prepare my remarks I had to find a Seymour object and I turned to my 1980 copy of Mindstorms my Seymour object it seemed a place to start I went to the hardback first edition the one with the orange cover that had the photo insert of a young girl commanding a floor turtle and soon this object is supposed to appear there it is this young girl had programmed a computer and logo to instruct the turtle to sketch out a bear and she looks happy as she surveys the results of her work next to her is a young boy while the girl is smiling he is laughing, he's joyful his hand is kind of lovingly grazing the back of the floor turtle the girl is Miriam Lawler and she's the daughter of psychologist Bob Lawler I don't know if he's here today Bob one of Seymour's students and collaborators the boy is the nephew of John Burlow tragically who has died Seymour's editor and dialogue partner as he wrote Mindstorms so my technology has been disconnected now these children grew up with logo and joy in this photo is part of their everyday experience of living in the logo culture and I begin with it because it illustrates so many of Seymour's most powerful ideas about objects and learning which is the topic that I've been given today so first we make by doing and constructing and it's great to think with objects in the world but when we get to build the great becomes awesome and these two children with the computer were building something of their own in a whole new way and Seymour saw that the computer would make it easier for thinking itself to become an object thought and just to digress a second when I was looking at this picture I remember kind of the magic of that moment when the picture was taken and what came to me was J.K. Rowling writing about magic and writing about Harry Potter where she says the wand chooses the wizard and the wizard chooses the wand and in some way Seymour chose the computer that object that would allow him to personalize learning and make learning something that you did actively but I like to think that the computer also chose Seymour in these years that mathematician, magician that would reveal the computer to the world in some kind of new way and Mindstorms did, this picture did reveal the computer to the world in a very, very new way in 1984 this was not how people thought of how children and computers went together and when I began to interview children like these this is when I came into the picture I began to interview children like these about their learning to program I could hear how right Seymour was it was dramatic one 13 year old said to me when you program a computer you put a little piece of your mind into the computer's mind and you start to think of yourself differently you start to think of yourself differently philosophy comes to everyday life that is very heady stuff Seymour called that kind of identification of mind and object mind and machine the egocentonic quality of programming he used the language of sentinicity deliberately to create a resonance between the language of computation and the language of the psychoanalytic tradition and then he heightened this resonance by talking about body sentinicity as well which brings me to the boy draped around the turtle Seymour loved to get children to figure out how to program by playing turtle Nicholas spoke about that he acted that out for you when children were making those turtle circles they were playing turtle they were identifying in their bodies what they could make the turtle do he loved it that children could experience their ideas through the turtle's physical actions that they could connect body to body with something that came from their mind for the most powerful learning Seymour aspired to identifications of body and mind and more a deep identification of body and emotions we love the objects we think with we think with the objects we love and backwards we think with the objects we love we love the objects we think with so teach people with the objects they love teach people with the objects they're in love with you're a teacher, measure your success by whether your students are falling in love with their objects. Because if they are, the way they think about themselves will also be changing. And now we're going to take away the two children because I'm going to tell a story about a much older person. Very soon after Seymour and I became friends in fall 1976, he wanted to meet my grandfather in Brooklyn. I was very nervous because my grandfather was naturally disapproving of any one of my friends who had a beard. But Seymour was a great hit, and here's how he did it. He began by offering my grandfather a lot of food from Zabars. He came prepared, and then after the food, Seymour quite unexpectedly. And I wonder how many of you know what's coming next. Later, I might ask how many of you know what's coming next. He quite unexpectedly took out small red balls that he had in his bag, and he began to teach my grandfather to juggle. Now, my grandfather was a very formal man, a serious man, a large man. He had dressed to meet Seymour in slacks, a dress shirt, a tie. No one had ever seen him as the kind of man who might want to learn to juggle. But now, he was passing a red rubber ball from hand to hand, which if you've read Mindstorms, you know is the first stage in learning how to juggle. And so they began. The two men stayed at the juggling lesson for about an hour. There was snack breaks. The Zabar thing came out. There were moments of frustration, but basically my grandfather learned to juggle enough and more extraordinary. At some point, Seymour began to ask him how he felt about it. What was working? Not working. How could they fix it? What was coming to mind? I'm like looking like in morbid fascination. My grandfather told Seymour that as a young man, he had been a bookbinder. The juggling brought back distinct, happy memories of being young, of working with his hands, and of being kind of good at the discipline of work with unforgiving, demanding materials. My grandfather talked about repetitive patterns. He was basically describing the pleasures of a kind of procedural thinking. So it was all there in the juggling. Learning through objects, ego-sintinicity, body-sintinicity, and that something more that objects can give you, a direct way to engage the emotional life of the learner. My grandfather had a drop out of school when he was 12 years old. In learning to juggle, probably for the first time and the longest time, he saw that he could still learn something new. He became a bit smitten with juggling. He became, and that was good for me, a bit smitten with Seymour. But in the conversation and in the reminiscence after, something else kicked in. The most important thing kicked in. My grandfather became a bit smitten with himself as a learner and as someone who could think of his learning life in a positive light. Looking back, it wasn't that surprising. In love, you attach to the object because it brings you to a different way of appreciating yourself. Seymour's gift was to bring that insight to the world of learning. Now, in his explorations of how objects carry identity as well as ideas, you can see Seymour's desire to take the cool studies of learning that were his Piagetian heritage and infuse them, not only with ideas about making things, about action and construction, but also with ideas about feeling things, about love and connection, but also about anxiety and ambivalence, because that's part of learning as well. And if not voiced, they block learning. In 1976, the year of the juggling lesson, Seymour was deep into his experiments in what he called loud thinking. It's what he was asking my grandfather to do. What are you trying? What are you feeling? What does it remind you of? If you want to think about thinking and the real process of learning, catch yourself in the act of learning. Try that. Say what comes to mind and don't censor yourself. If this sounds like free association and psychoanalysis, well, yes. If this sounds like it could get you into very personal, uncharted, and maybe scary terrain, that's true. When I met Seymour, he was on a personal journey with the great psychoanalyst Greta Bebrink. And I think that that journey was a big part of what made him eager to bring his own work, his own personal work, something to bring to his own personal work, something of what the psychoanalytic tradition has to offer learning cultures. When other people talked about messy learning and you might think about children being encouraged to get soil under their fingernails, remember that Seymour's ideas about messy learning meant that no association, no association to your body and mind was taboo. My own studies of psychology took place at Harvard and William James Hall. The psychologists who studied thinking were on one floor. The psychologists who studied feeling were on another floor. They never met metaphorically for the world of learning. Seymour asked the elevator to stop between the floors so that there could be a new conversation. That place between the floors is not a simple place, but it's a place for the most authentic and the most truthful conversation because we don't stop being our whole selves, our thinking and our feeling and our bodily selves when we learn. Bridging the thinking-feeling gap is easier if you consider objects. Seymour knew this and he famously wrote about how his love for the gears on a childhood toy car ignited his love of mathematics. From the beginning of my time at MIT, I've asked students to write about an object they loved that became central to their thinking and for 16 years, Mitch and I taught together and we assigned this topic together. I collected the best of 25 years in this essay dedicated it to Seymour and it's called Falling for Science, Objects in Mind. These students' testimonies are thrilling and you see them evoke a kind of intimate ethnography provoked by Seymour for generations of learning. It becomes clear how a love for science can start with a love for a microscope, a modem, a mud pie, a pair of dice, a fishing rod, plastic eggs and a twirled Easter basket reveal the power of centripetal force, experiments with baking illuminate the geology of planets. These stories about objects bring to light something so central to Seymour's legacy because his legacy is not only how children learn in classrooms and out of them, it's in using objects to help people think about how they know what they know. Since I'm speaking to an audience who primarily knows Seymour's influence on media and education, I wanna stress that his ideas about the power of objects have moved from these worlds where he nurtured them out into other disciplinary places. Social science, anthropology, social theory and history, people are studying objects of clothing, objects of kitchenware, objects of science, medical practice, objects of revolutionary culture in ways that all bear the trace of Seymour's wisdom. And I say trace because very often, you can see people fall off and forget that the hard lesson is to study the braided chain of thought and feeling together, that that's the big payoff because it's always easier and more measurable and more easily fundable to do a study where you keep things simple. And so I wanna end on this question of simplicity and complexity. One of the great virtues of putting object studies at the center of learning and an idea so critical to Seymour's legacy is that it becomes quickly clear when you're looking at a specific object that nothing of great value is ever simple. To return to my image of the elevator in William James Hall, that real conversation is happening between the floors. And if you approach learning stories through objects, you have such a good chance of getting to those more complex stories because we come to objects through the people who bring them to us. Take Seymour's famous learning story of the gears that brought him into mathematics. It seems like a simple story, not at all because behind those gears was Seymour's father who gave him the toy car that held the gears. The father he loved, who he wanted to please, but the father who didn't want him to be a mathematician at all, but someone who could take over the family business of running a pest control company in South Africa. Seymour was all set to study chemical engineering in college in order to take over the pest control company. But then he was persuaded, but not by his unhappy dad, into trying a liberal arts course for a year. Seymour interpreted this as a chance to take a year off to study mathematics and psychology. And well, from then, from there on, he became Seymour. But his father didn't like it. His father didn't like it. Those gears were emotionally charged with conflict and ambivalence and disappointment and competition. Seymour had a complex learning story. He was in touch with it and I think it contributed to his ability to nurture contradiction, innovation, originality, idiosyncrasy and deep creativity. It contributed to the intimate, non-judgmental attention that made him a great teacher and that deep learning that digital culture requires and continues to require more and more of all of us in order to make more of what he began. Thank you. It's been a privilege to be able to speak to you. Thank you, Terry. Thank you. Keeping with the idea of simplicity, moving right along, it's time to rethink laptops. We all know that how Seymour was involved with laptops and as the governor of Maine, Senator Angus King, started the Maine Learning Technology Initiative in 2002, which provided all students in grades seven through 12 with the learning technology, technology. The idea started with a conversation that the then governor had with Seymour. Senator King is here to join us via conversation via Skype. Welcome, Senator. Glad to be with you, Ira. Real pleasure and it's an honor for me to be able to join so many people in really celebrating Seymour's great contributions. I wanna start with a quick story and then talk about my interaction with Seymour. The story is that 50 years ago this summer, I had a job as a greenskeeper on a golf course and my job was to go out in the evening into the night and move the sprinklers around the golf course so that the next day it would look beautiful and green. By the way, it was the most satisfying job I think I've ever had because if you went out in the afternoon, there was a brown spot. You put extra water on it the next day. It was green and it made you have a real sense of accomplishment, which unfortunately in my particular world now doesn't come all that often. But in any case, I figured out how to move the sprinklers in 10 or 15 minutes, they had to be moved every hour. So in the 45 minutes that was left each night, each hour, I read Arnold Toynbee's study of history. You have to picture this 22 year old kid sitting on a golf course at 11 o'clock at night with a headlamp on reading Toynbee. But the image that I remember so vividly from that reading was the image that Toynbee had of civilization moving up a mountain by plateaus. And all of us would be on one of the plateaus and then all of a sudden two or three people or a half dozen would scramble up the cliff, figure out a way to get to the top and then reach down and pull the rest of us up. And that was Toynbee's image of leadership and how history was shaped by a few brave, intrepid, inventive and creative people, generation by generation and age by age. Now, let me jump to Seymour. One of the great things about being a governor and now a senator is when you call people up and invite them to lunch, they generally come. And someone had mentioned to me, there was this fellow named Seymour Pappert who had moved to Maine on the coast and he was an interesting guy about education and I was involved in education as governor. This was in probably 1996 or 97, just about 20 years ago. So Seymour came and we chatted and naturally the conversation turned to school technology and this was the day and age of a computer labs and big clunky, mostly DOS machines, a lot of wires and they were in places that were down the hall and you get to use them. Students would get to use them 45 minutes a week if that. And at that time, the ratio I had checked before talking to Seymour and the ratio of computer, of children to computers in Maine was about five kids per unit, per computer. And that was not bad actually in 1996, 1997. So I said to him, we're at five to one what do you think? Is that pretty good? He sort of shook his head and I'm sure many of you there can picture him sort of pursed his lips and shook his head and said no. And I said, well, what if we could really stretch our budget and make it three to one? Wouldn't that be cool? And he said no. And then I got the feeling I was in a negotiation and I said, well, this is sort of a crazy idea but how about one computer for every two kids? And I'll never forget, as long as I live, I can tell you exactly where he was sitting. He was sitting to my right and he put his fingers up in front of him like this and he said, it is only when it is one to one that the power occurs. It is only when it is one to one that the power occurs. Well, that was a profound insight but it was not a particularly useful one at that moment because state budgets and local budgets and school budgets are always strained and under stress and the idea of providing a computer for every student was preposterous. Well, if you flash forward three or four years, this was the 90s, remember? I got a call from our budget folks in December of 1999 saying, Governor, we haven't told anybody this yet but next spring, it looks like we're gonna have a $70 million surplus. Now, for those of you that are not familiar with the term surplus because it's fallen out of use lately, we had more money than we expected and I had been governor at that point for six years and I said to my staff and to myself, we've had surpluses before and we've put 1% into education and 2% into roads and 1% into whatever, the parks or whatever, but no real change was made. I wanna think about how to use this money that nobody expects in such a way as to change main. How can we do something that will make it look different the day after that it did before and particularly, how can we do something that will strengthen and undergird the growth of our economy? And we sort of thought about it and I remembered Seymour's one-to-one comment and mentioned that to a young man on my staff, a guy named Jim Doyle, and I said, let's think about this idea, is there some way we can work on this? And I was leaving right before Christmas and I stuck my head in Jim's office and said, well, what do you come up with? And he had his laptop in front of him and he said, well, I figure if we take 50 million of that 70 million and put it in the bank at interest and raise 10 or 15 million more, we can create an endowment that would buy a laptop for every student in Maine forever. And I said, wow, that's it. And that was the origin of what came to be called the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, MLTI, which is still going to this day. Now, there were a lot of things that happened between that moment and actually implementing the project, including some very narrow votes in the legislature. This was an enormously complicated and complex and controversial initiative. I thought at the time that it was self-evident, that they were gonna put me on the main equivalent of Mount Rushmore because this was such a self-evidently good idea. It wasn't self-evident to the people of Maine. The email to my office opposing the idea was 10 to one against the emails. These were people with computers in 1999, 2000. The emails were 10 to one against the letters. One legislator told me that this was the most controversial issue he had ever seen among his constituents. He said, governor, it's gay rights, abortion and clear cutting all rolled into one. It caused an enormous stir in conversation in Maine. It passed the legislature, there were a couple of iterations by one vote, very, very narrow, and yet we made it. The money turned, of course, the budget in 2000 and 2001 declined somewhat, remember, after September 11th. So the question became, can we do it just in the seventh and eighth grade rather than all the way up through high school? And my answer was yes, we're gonna establish this. And now I think 60, 70, 80% of our high schools are also one to one and all seventh and eighth graders. Every child in Maine, every seventh and eighth grader, rich town, poor town, big, little, suburban, rural has this opportunity. And that was part of the idea. And it was part of Seymour's idea. This was about equity. This was about giving kids a tool that many of them would have never otherwise had the opportunity to handle, to access and to use. And I remember vividly a teacher in one of our small rural towns telling me that the first day they handed out, the first contract was with Apple and they got those white iBooks that you probably remember. They just, they came right after the colorful clam ones from the late 90s. And this little boy had his new Apple white iBook gleaming sitting in front of him and tears were streaming down his face. And his teacher said, Frankie, why are you crying? What's the matter? And he said, I've never had something this nice before. And then, of course, we opened up, we opened those iBooks, those laptops, and the whole world came into Maine classrooms. One of the funniest letters that we received during this period was when a fellow wrote to one of the state senators and he said, tell Governor King, if he wants to do something for the kids in my town, he should buy them each a chainsaw. Well, my response to that was, at least he understood it's a tool. The difference is that a chainsaw tops out at about $20 an hour and a computer tops out at Bill Gates. So the whole idea was equity and opening up the world and again, remember this was 2000 when we started, it finally was implemented in 2001 and 2002, but we were at an early stage at that point. And what I think is important as it relates to Seymour, and Seymour taught me this, that we were really fundamentally changing the idea of how education is done. All of us, I presume all of us over 30 or so, grew up in an age, maybe 40, grew up in an age where education, particularly K through 12 education, was essentially content driven. Giving information to people. Columbus discovered America in 1492. And the whole idea was that you had smart person standing in front of the classroom, discorging information to students and they would duly memorize it, learn it and then spit it back on an exam, but it was content driven. What Seymour realized and what I came to realize is that the laptop, the digital device, fundamentally changes that paradigm of education from content driven to process driven. And I don't think we fully come to grips with the fact that the internet, Google search, now gives us access to all the information that we need. So the real question is not the information, but how do you use the information? How do you use the information in order to solve problems and deal with the complexities of the world? So moving from content driven to process driven was the great insight of our project and was also really one of Seymour's fundamental insights. He put it this way, he coined a phrase, I suspect some of you it's probably already been used today. He said, the challenge of the new age, and I'm paraphrasing, but the challenge of the new age is not learning what other people know, it's learning, learning. It's learning how to learn, how to access information and most importantly, how to use it. So like I said at the beginning, Seymour Papert changed my life because he provided me with some insights that then turned into public policy. I have to say that Seymour understood computing and education a lot better than he did the main legislature, but that was my department. And between the two of us, we managed with a lot of wonderful help from people across the state and from educators across the state and citizens and parents who got it and who helped us get this project put into place. But it was Seymour who provided the fundamental idea. It was, this is as clear a case as I can think of, of a thinker and a creative intellectual providing ideas and proposals and plans that ended up being manifested in real live public policy affecting, I figure now we've had about 150,000 kids go through Maine who have had that experience and I meet them all the time whose lives were changed, particularly kids in the smaller rural areas that wouldn't have had that opportunity otherwise, whose lives were changed by this initiative that really all started with that lunch with Seymour. So my conclusion going back to Arnold Toynbee is that Seymour is one of those men and women, men or women that scrambled up that cliff and taught something to the rest of us, reached down and helped us pull ourselves up to a new level. I'm deeply appreciative of your offering me the opportunity to say thanks to Seymour, to so many of his friends, to thanks so many of his friends who I know worked with him on our project, to thanks Suzanne who was a wonderful stalwart friend throughout all of this and the many people in Maine, Betty Manchester and hundreds of others, Chris Toynbee who worked so hard on this to make it work. And I would add one final item and that is one of Seymour's insights that was so important to the success of our project was that this wasn't a technology project. This wasn't a hardware project. This was about teaching and learning. It was about student achievement. It was about access to information. And that insight led us to do a great deal more of professional development of our teachers, of our educators before we started handing out laptops. In many parts of the country, as many of you know, people think it's kind of self executing good idea. You hand out the laptops and magic and great things happen. That really generally isn't true. It's about how this new world of information access is integrated into the teaching and learning. And that was another one of the insights of Seymour that was so important to the success of what we did. So again, I wanna thank all of you there for allowing me the opportunity to express something that's been in my heart for a long time. I love that man and he did so much for us and he really made a difference I think in American and world civilization and education and the opportunity of people all over the world starting in Maine to make a real difference using these tools that he saw would make such a difference in people's lives. Thanks again for the opportunity to be with you. Thank you, Senator King. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to be with us today for those hearty words. Now, nobody really knows what the future will be like but we know what it won't be like. We know it won't be lots of children sitting in desks with pencil and paper writing all the day. We know that these new technologies, computers will be an important part of it. If you go into any school or any home, you'll find many pencils, many crayons, many paint brushes because these are instruments that people have made part of their lives. They use the pencil whenever they have a need for it to draw, to write a story, to calculate and so with the computer, it's the natural instrument for doing mathematics, for music, for a hundred other things and our goal here is to make it sufficiently part of the culture of the place that everybody uses it when it's needed. And now it's time to start rethinking schools. You're gonna talk about schools, time to see more how to sort of yin-yang approach to schools as we've been talking about it. He wanted an evolution of schools or a revolution in schools and on the one hand with them to make them better or get rid of them and find something else that might work and it worked in both areas. And here to help us understand what he meant to rethink schools are my next panelists whom again we'll give him a minute to introduce themselves and then we'll get in, a minute, then we'll get into a good conversation. Start on the end there. My name's Serena Upedes. I teach at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in the Faculty of Education and the School of Environmental Studies. I'm at Seymour in 1984 when I joined Project Headlight at the Hennigan School. Don't you want to? Seymour? Seymour? Are we doing our whole thing? No, just introduce yourself. I think that was my marching orders. Okay. Then I'm Todd McOver. I'm a composer and professor here at the Media Lab and I've been here since the beginning of the Media Lab and worked with Seymour in many different contexts. Hello, I'm Di Torell. I'm a constructionist learning theorist, researcher and also building startups and companies in education technology to commercialize, commercialize constructionist learning. I've worked with Seymour as a student. I then was his colleague here at the Media Lab. I learned about learning environments first and foremost from being here which is an amazing learning environment that he very much designed and influenced. And then we built companies together, Mama Media, World Wide Workshop and Global Aurea. My name is Paolo Blikstein. I'm an assistant professor at Stanford University at the School of Education. And I first met Seymour here at the lab when I was a student. I'm sort of a grandson of Seymour. I was advised by first David Cavallo here at the lab then Uri Vilensky at Northwestern University. And at Stanford I bring a lot of the learnings and the ideas that I've learned here and then from Uri at Northwestern to a whole new geographic area and to a traditional School of Education. And it's been a really interesting ride. I'm going to ask questions for each one of you but I want all of you to feel free. Like we're having a little discussion and feel free to jump in with an answer. And Todd, I see that you wanted to say some more stuff about education. I didn't want to be the first one to say that. You want me to go first? I want you to go first. I'm going first. That's what we want. I'm a teacher, I do recess. During our first conversation together I remember Seymour saying that we might be better off without schools entirely. In the very next breath he spoke with utter glee about Project Headlight at the Hennigan School where I would be spending the next couple of years teaching music and writing a book about what I learned there. I was completely startled by the shocking notion that we destroy all the schools quote-unquote but equally taken aback that he could hold in his mind at the same time excitement for a school project while denouncing schools as institutions. I was to learn that this kind of thinking holding these seemingly contradictory ideas in juxtaposition was nothing unusual for Seymour and indeed was a hallmark of his thinking. Now I confess at the time I thought that ridding ourselves of schools entirely was a little out there. I had and still have much respect for teachers and public education. I hold dear the time that I spent at the Hennigan and I was overwhelmed to be reunited with some of the teachers, parents and students today at break. I'm going to read you some words sent to me from one of those students a few months ago and who was actually pictured in the video we just saw. Franny Vituius said, he made us as ten-year-olds feel extraordinary in the truest sense of the word. He managed to convey through his undivided attention and palpable delight his belief that our ideas were meaningful, interesting, novel, and worthy of attention. Could there be a greater gift to a kid than that? The value that he placed on us in such a formative time of our lives impacted our very ideas of self, our capacities, and our potential. We carry that with us to this day. Now, despite my affection for schools, for the Hennigan, I could not let that idea go about getting rid of schools altogether. And it wasn't until decades later that I realized my current work in school architecture may well have had its roots in thinking about schools with Seymour. Let me ask all of you now to think of something you love. We've heard about passion and love all morning. Something you do at every opportunity. Something you might be doing right now if you weren't here celebrating Seymour's ideas. Now, please raise your hand if it has something to do, this thing you love, with the arts, the body, or the natural world. Keep your hands in the air if you learned about it at school. What's striking, of course, is that so few of us encounter the learning we love most at school. And why is that? Is it because we don't value sailing or woodworking or cooking as curriculum subjects? Or is it the limitations of the schools themselves? It's hard to learn about Thai cooking if your school doesn't have a kitchen. It's hard to learn to rock climb if there's no rock wall, much less a mountain cliff. Or learn to grow mustard seeds if there's no school garden. I've come to believe that school architecture, the physical spaces outside and in and around the school, shape learning as much as teachers. So I wonder now if that seeming contradiction emanating from Seymour those many decades ago can be reconciled by revisiting our ideas about the physical spaces of schools. Or maybe those seemingly contradictory ideas don't need to be reconciled at all. Thank you. Very good. Great. Yeah, you can come on. So what should the purpose of school be? I mean, if we're rethinking school, and I know we have two musicians on the panel here, people involved in music. We see now that music or the arts, and if you look at it, what I'd like to observe is everything in media now, whether it's television or radio or film or theater, has some sort of education of science in it everywhere, from the theater where you were talking about scientists to the big bang theory on television. People are using music and the media to teach things. I mean, is that, should we be doing more of that in school? What are you thinking about? Are you looking? Yes. Okay. So I brought three books. This one, obviously, is all falling apart. But everybody talked about so many amazing ideas that were introduced in Mindstorms. And so let me pick something that maybe people didn't mention yet, which was so incredible when I read it for the first time. Seymour talked about the fact that there is a very established word for pedagogy, for teaching, for instruction. There are so many words about the art of teaching, which is pedagogy. And here, he's introducing a word that for some reason didn't take off, and it's a beautiful word, trying to use it as much as I can for the art of learning, which is pathetic. And I would suggest that maybe starting today, as we move into the future, we'll all start to use that word more often in school. Because if you only talk about pedagogy and you only try to perfect teaching rather than thinking about the art of learning and how do you really dance another thing that he expressed in the children's machine, it's this idea of a triangle in geometry. He looked at knowledge, he looked at teachers or adults, and then he looked at children or learners here. And he was trying to really mix it all around and say, it's this wonderful dance and balance that we have to do. And he will speak with his body, and it was very symptonic about that, that the adults should really not own the knowledge and give it to the learners. The adults should be learners more and practice the art of learning, practice mathematics. And the children, the learners, the students, even here at the Media Lab, their job is to learn the art of learning and to learn to construct learning and to learn to really appropriate the knowledge in a way that they own it rather than the teacher owning it. And I think if you think about rethinking schools and why computers were so important for Seymour is because there were these magical tools that if they are programmable, if you can really construct with them and you can think through your constructions about your thinking, about the art of thinking, about the art of learning, then school can really transform even the most rigid situations. But there is one more thing. Every time he expresses his love for teachers and we do have some teachers here, Linda and Joanne are here from Project Headlight, which was so amazing for me to meet them today after so long. Because Seymour's respect for teachers, no matter how bad schools were, the architecture was not right and there was segmented by ages and grades and 45 minutes and all the things, he always expressed respect for the education leadership of the school and for the teachers. And his way of connecting with them, his way of maybe creating this object that will connect them to knowledge and to the art of learning, especially through dance. And so all of our workshops with teachers started with doing some dancing and movement, and that was so much fun and he felt that actually all the things that we're doing today, just sitting, we all have to stand up just for a second to honor that idea. Okay, not just the circles and the square, but we think better, we connect to learning, we become more artistic and more creative if we dance and it worked magic on all the teachers that we worked with. How much of that is moving from what, you know, we talked about being a student being a sponge and there's some teacher up in front and just instructs to using all of your senses to learn. Now not just, let me go first here and I'll come back to you. Yeah, so one interesting thing that I think we all talked about and noticed is that the object that Seymour picked for the passion that a student would get engaged with, I think grew and developed over his career not surprisingly, I think he started out by thinking about mathematics as the most important thing to teach and what the ways of playing with mathematics would be and that evolved in a way into engineering with a turtle and then maybe to robotics with building things and then into dance. There was an incredibly important project Seymour did. Gloria Anna Davenport and I were trying to remember the year I think it was about 2000-2001 called Robale, where he actually combined not just movement but he had a group of children work together to program choreography. They actually programmed robots to move and then that became their script for their own choreography and so I was really surprised, you know, my field is music and Seymour and I spent a lot of time talking about ideas and about learning and about creativity and about that same time I think it was 2002 or 2003 he came to me and said why don't we figure out if it's possible to make an entire school where the entire curriculum is music and so it's funny because I remember the project, we wrote a paper, we wrote a proposal and I was remembering that it was my idea, but it wasn't thinking back, no it wasn't. In fact all the good ideas in that paper were Seymour's ideas but the fact that he had evolved at this point not just of movement but the idea that first of all music is a great passion for lots of people I won't say everybody but many, many people that music is Seymour understood that music was something that had so many layers of understanding of ways of using our minds and our bodies and our knowledge that it could be broken down so that through engaging in music understanding it and making it going back to what Ira said before you actually could learn everything else so we thought through music and we made a school and a curriculum where you could learn math through thinking about sound and space and time you could learn about physics through thinking about acoustics and measurement you could think about programming by maybe making new instruments and making them do things, learn about neuroscience by thinking about how music is why we like it, how we process it learn about narrative Seymour was very interested in how you tell stories and how you teach people to tell and to write so you could learn about narrative and communication through composing expression through performing and I think what was maybe most subversive about his idea when I was thinking about it over the last few days so of course he recognized how powerful music is for building community for bringing people together that's what music is for but you know you say why would Seymour think about music I don't know how many of you ever tried to make music with Seymour but it wasn't his first talent and people have preferred today about the fact no no but Seymour nobody actually said explicitly today that one of the things Seymour did throughout his entire career was not just to teach other people and interrogate them the story Sherry told about her grandfather was just so moving really amazing but Seymour used to teach himself things that he didn't know how to do and he would do that so he could go through the process of understanding how to learn that so we've all observed him do various things and one day he came to my office and said I'm trying to learn how to sing would you help me do that and I did try to help him do that he could not sing you know it wasn't so why music I think for Seymour that was one of the powers of it I think that he really believed I remember when he received the Lego chair it was a physical chair made out of Lego bricks an incredible thing he juggled and he talked about his own learning to juggle and thinking about juggling and I may get this wrong but I'm almost sure he said it would have been great to have a tool to help learn to juggle because everybody needs that and he said I've never forgot that he said everybody is good at something and everybody's not good at something everybody and so we all need help with the things we're not good at and I think with music he thought here's this activity which usually is taught in conservatories with expertise but actually it's something that has so many aspects that if you present it the right way we're not awkward we're all uneasy, nobody's comfortable at it and we can set up an environment where we're collaborating and instead of being experts we're all adventurers and we're all open minded and we're all uncomfortable in a profound way and I think actually that's what I learned most from Seymour that that's the kind of environment where everybody can learn from each other nobody is feeling superior and it's exactly the kind of collaboration that all of us was talking about that's what the school was about and I think that's the model that Seymour left to me that I think about every day Speaking great segue well yes you want to applaud great segue to Paolo speaking of environment and creating a space where kids can experiment with things that's what you have done, haven't you? Yes and you know I think everything important in life can be a quote from Hamilton so that's my main thing so in Hamilton at some point George Washington tells Hamilton that winning is easy governing is harder and I think we kind of won the war of the minds I mean no one in the right mind these days would say programming is bad no one should learn it or project based learning is terrible we should go back to road learning to go that way but for the most part those ideas it took 50 years but they have penetrated the mainstream and that's what people think about so that's the winning part the governing part is how to make it happen in the real world and I think that's one of the big things that I'm struggling with and I think we should engage as a community is that the way it's going there is a risk that constructionism and all of those things will become a luxury for rich kids in affluent schools and if we don't very intentionally start to engage with public school systems and they're they're not perfect systems there are a lot of issues and bureaucracy and all of that but if we don't intentionally engage with those systems kids that go to those schools have the chance to experience any of the ideas we're talking about here because it's not going to happen spontaneously and it will create tragically a new digital divide which is kids in public schools will be using video learning and watching lectures on computers they will have computers but they will watch lectures on them and kids on affluent schools will be using computers for robotics or programming or all kinds of creative things for music and all of that so I think this is something that I think it's the challenge of the new generation or this new decade for us constructionists is how to democratize this technologist now that there is no the debate is not anymore if it's worth teaching or not but when I go to public schools and then to private schools I mean I see a contrast that is really very sad and I think it's our responsibility to address it I want to be in the room when that happens so Hamilton that's a good one let's maybe talk a little bit about this idea how do you bring schools that can't even, you talk about music schools are eliminating music programs because they can't afford it or they're prioritizing something else but I think the point that Paolo was making that is so essential to everything that I think we said here is that notion there is talent everywhere and people can really practice being creative and as he talked about the three stages of the three stages of learning he talks about the babies being grabbing and sucking and in a possession way constructing knowledge through self-driven learning by exploring and then all of a sudden they're beginning to be talked to and they're beginning to be told and it gets into school where we actually are all school survivors he used to call us and if we were good and we were creative and we had connection to learning environments with music connections between physics and music or to certain teachers that we were able to kind of like move into the art of learning we actually learned how to read we learned how to use libraries we learned about the world so there was something also good about school but the real school survivors that then became committed again in stage three to being learning explorers or learning through creativity or learning through balancing better knowledge construction through creative acts were actually what he called the ones that will end up then rethinking and re-visualizing the schools and bringing it everywhere because there is talent everywhere everybody is really good at something and not good at something we have different learning styles and all these things can really be meshed together very successfully if we really move from stage one to stage two to stage three which is blending stage one and stage two and I don't know if you I'd be curious what you think since you're all my impression is that that Seymour approached this idea of an M school the idea was make a separate school that has this as the entire charter even something like the Henningin school was a separate school one laptop per child is individual I think the bigger question is there a way of standardizing schools the only reason for schools is it's a community it's a way for people to do things together otherwise you could group here and there just wonder what this is where one of these tensions and how do you hold contradictory ideas at once because that word standardizing he was very good at that by the way and it doesn't go very well with Mitch's four project passion peers I'm sorry I failed play good three out of four I still pass the idea that that is driven by the passion of the students so when I asked all of you what you love you know nobody's there might be two or three floutists in the crowd but it's not that they all love the same thing so the standardizing is the condition standardizing is awful so nobody wants standardizing but I think it goes back to what you said which is if if you have many different possibilities and it's very difficult to have access to any of them or special ones so maybe standardizing isn't the word but if there's a great idea to make something vastly better how do you make that available to everybody and so that goes back to the democratizing issue that we started this round with which is how do you bring that to the non affluent schools how do you bring it to the larger populations but also to the home so I think what was really nice about the connected family book is that he all of a sudden realized that there's so much work to do well the internet was out there it was 1995 and we were really driven to bring constructionism to the home we all of a sudden realized that actually parents and grandparents have an opportunity that they don't know really very much in boxes they're very much into standards there can be as bad some home environments are as bad as schools and how do you really tweak that and create the constructionist mindset the creative mindset the idea that you can really learn more by connecting all these islands of knowledge and as parents what do you do and I think it was really interesting to see him struggling with the same ideas when he was out there all of a sudden in the mid late 90s trying to think about well there's so much work to do also when the computers are in the home and just like in schools there were the work that he did with Cynthia Salomon and all the work about the creative teachers of the 60s and the 70s and even early 80s when they were like the rebels who were just doing this there's some parents who are like that too Valor you want to jump in? I just want to mention a couple of things about the democratizing aspect I think the two very important developments and opportunities for this to happen one is that as we were talking here just before there are thousands of maker spaces popping up everywhere in every country in public and private schools of course they're much more concentrated in private schools but those are spaces where different kinds of learning happen and differently from when you take a few robotic kids to a school and run a workshop those are permanent places where you cannot really lecture them they're just not meant for lecturing so this is a really important opportunity because now we have a place for constructionism which is fixed and it exists permanently in schools and the second opportunity is that many countries periodically they revise their national curricula and I know that the board curricula here might make you start shaking and throwing eggs at me but so countries do revise their national curricula every 5-10 years and many of them have added project based learning coding and all of that the whole entire countries that are considering adding and states in the US programming and all of that I know that a lot of times they lead to over standardization to terrible kinds of projects and all of that but they are an opportunity for us to introduce in national policy and national curricula those kinds of things but we cannot let the policy makers say I'll take it from here let me design the curricula and the stuff we have to keep engaged with policy makers and all of that to make sure that it doesn't end up a horrible implementation of something so we need to think about those things because those things will not happen spontaneously and there is a big gap between all the very deep and profound ideas we are discussing here and making them happen in the real world and it's kind of dirty and satisfying work and it's not pure and it's not as deep and all of that but it's work that if we don't do it no one else will and I think it's really important and it's not just we it's the kids that were his hope I think the concept of child power and how maybe if we bring it to homes and we bring it to the public schools and to the masses eventually there will be a tipping point where it will not be about the governments it will be about the kids I think all PC was very much driven by that concept too and that if we if we can create this tipping point where kids can all of a sudden have power to say I want to learn music in my school or I'm not going to come I'm going to do certain things in my mathematics curriculum and connect it with music or with art or I'm just not going to do it and all the kids he has this image of all the kids kind of bunching together and really at the end that was his vision and I think it's absolutely going to happen when I begin to really work on larger scales in public school systems and you see the empowerment that all of a sudden kids really have confidence in themselves as learners they are in love with the objects of their creation all of a sudden they can take a stance and express themselves they feel that power and you're beginning to see them moving and I think as we are moving into this world of 1 billion 2 billion, 3 billion, 7 billion of people teaching one day, learning one day teaching one hour, learning one hour I think we're going to see that child power concept totally taking over so and that he envisioned this already 40, 50 years ago I think and I think that's what we're beginning to see already as we are planting the seeds of Seymour everywhere the revolution and the kids will drive it Hamiltonian, the learners the learners, the learners the learners of all ages well speaking of rising up we have to rise up now and go to lunch, rethinking lunch so thank you panelists for taking time, rise up we're ready to begin with our afternoon program and we'll start it off with another great video I think school generally is a little bit idea of this in mathematics it's almost entirely idea of this you learn skills how to do things even when you learn how to solve certain puzzle like problems you're never dealing with the ideas interesting our next speaker is Alan K not the survivalist Alan K not the teeny bopper disc jockey Murray the K and he is a former professional jazz guitarist composer, theatrical designer an amateur classic pipe organist which I did not know he did not invent the K Pro which I thought for many years he did it was my computer of choice so it's good to know that and his deep interest in developing children's learning and thinking via being inspired by Seymour in 1968 and learning logo where he says the catalysts for these ideas and they continue to make up the center of his research so here to address the topic rethinking ideas please welcome Alan K thank you thanks a lot and so Nicholas did his usual thing of taking something that was nicely homogenized together in Seymour's mind which are things about learning and things about ideas and things about teaching and things about math and so forth and broken them out into these separate sessions now the thing about ideas is that most ideas in mediocre down to bad and the problem is when people have them they are so excited to have an idea they tend to act and this explains this explains a lot of what has been going on in the world so one of the ways of counteracting that is we can have processes for debugging them and that's a powerful idea it's okay to have ideas if you have processes to debug that's kind of what science is science is a set of processes to get around of what's wrong with our brains and a powerful idea about the powerful idea is hey there are powerful ideas in one there are probably more and because they are powerful we should put some effort into trying to figure out what they are and to invent more so that's what we'll talk about in these few minutes and just taking one big one like writing and it speaks over distance and time but what's powerful about writing was unsuspected and that is it actually changes the way we actually think it's not just a transliteration of an oral mode of thought it actually creates co-creates new modes of thought and this is why writing is associated with every civilization that we know we don't know of a civilization based on oral modes of thought and the powerful idea about that is well we should be able to invent more qualitative thought vehicles and we have math, science some of the ideas I'll talk about in a second so this last year has been a devastating year for some of the greats in thinking about powerful ideas we lost Marvin one of his favorite sayings was you don't understand something if you only understand it one way we lost Jerome Bruner made it to 100 and he was still vital said any subject can be taught in an intellectually honest form if we heed their level of development that is something that Marvin believed and that's something that Seymour believed and we lost Seymour who had a wide variety I picked one that I was sure was going to be used already and it was that is a reflection on the difference between learning something in a class and learning something as part of a culture and I'll come back to that towards the end Marvin also like to say that school is the best thing ever invented to keep you from thinking about something important for more than a few minutes and if Marvin were here right now he would say well a short talk is the same think about it and in fact think about where we are we are in a forum idolizing rightly a person who didn't believe in the direct classroom process and yet we've had one thing after another and you're sitting out there so the ironies are delicious here Jerry Bruner said the most neglected big idea is the very idea the bigness of ideas it's hard for people to even deal with a powerful idea in taking in what the power is because the power is often a power of changing the context and you can't fully appreciate the new idea in the old context and Seymour had a great line he said the scandal of education is that every time you teach something which is what I'm trying to do here wrongly you defy the learner of the pleasure and benefit of discovery and so his idea and the idea of Montessori and many other great educators is to set up the conditions so the people don't have to invent difficult things completely from scratch but so that the important parts of the learning are done by them and not by trying to force them to remember something and in fact here's maybe a better metaphor for what we're doing because it kind of looks like this at a camp campfire you're waiting for me to tell stories because that's what oral modes of thought are about and yet we live in a civilization that was made by finding stronger ways of thinking than oral modes think about that and of course Seymour was here he would say hey wait this is bullshit let's do a workshop of some kind and the reason he would say that is that our languages are primarily made for stories and the way the words work in languages is they set up categories the categories tend to be antagonistic to each other and so right away you're in a problem if you're trying to think of things in terms of language trying to explain things in terms of language the language can do a few things for you but not the other and so I would like you to pick your reality kit up let's do something where we all actually do something and now you can open it okay just do what it says and if you watch me one of the ways of doing it is holding it up like this and moving it in slowly so about 9 inches from your face you'll see something interesting so you cover your right eye look at the plus with your left eye and move your head in anybody see it so this is something that good thinkers do at least once a day it's the equivalent of yoga for the mind okay and so the next question is what did you see where the dot was did you see nothing was there nothing there what did you see or did you see something like this where did that text come from think about it that dot went away it was always on the page and suddenly you saw stuff that could not possibly be there so here's what's going on that inside your eye and we have among the stupidest designed eyes in the animal kingdom because unlike the eyes of a squid which have the blood vessels on the back of the retina our particular path of evolution and if you ever talk to a person who hasn't thought much about evolution this is a good one squids have good eyes but nature for our eyes most mammalian eyes have the blood vessels on the front and so the light actually has to go through the blood vessels and your brain actually subtracts it out so you have less acuity there than you think and where the blood vessels come in is there are no light sensitive cells at all and to the side is where most of the light sensitive cells is about a million pixels there and you're legally blind out in the periphery and here's what happens when you move the paper in you move it in until the dot gets where there are no cells and it winks out and if you had a good brain it would show you nothing but because you have a brain that insists on projecting its view of reality on the world what it's doing is filling in with the stuff that is around it and so what you're actually seeing is nothing that was on your retina you're seeing a complete recreation through the knowledge that you have cool huh so we have a blind spot and what's the powerful idea about it we can't learn to see until we realize we're blind because otherwise we say seeing is believing McLuhan said I can't see something until I believe it that's much more the case and the powerful idea about that is it makes a huge difference if ideas are experienced in as many ways as possible because this makes it much more difficult for our brains to fool us in what it is that we think we're seeing and of course seeing is a metaphor for thinking now here's a different powerful idea is an invention called human rights and it brings the hidden to light powerful ideas take you from knowing something which is what schools tend to teach to insight those of us who knew Seymour and loved him and Marvin I can't think of the two apart they were such an influence on us this is what they were fantastic at the way they liked to understand things were in insightful ways and if they didn't understand something in an insightful way they put in the effort to try and find an insight and these insights are just completely mind blowing because every single one of them like great art his job is to take us out of thinking we're in reality and to show us that there's a larger reality in chamber music they have this wonderful thing saying which is climbing the mountain the reward is to see the higher mountains and that's what these guys did for us powerful ideas create new context for thinking and powerful ideas can be very difficult to learn and partly because many of them require the context to be changed people tend to be conservative on their context I first met Marvin in 1968 when I was a graduate student he gave a talk out where I went to school on education and if you'd like to read this talk it's more or less what he wrote up a couple of years later for his touring award lecture very similar to it and it was full of Papert and Piaget and as Marvin said in his touring award lecture Papert's ideas pervade this essay and part of it was the ideas about children of a certain level of development when looking at water poured from the same glass into a tall thin glass I think there's more water there and some children realize that the water is the same and they will come to different conclusions at different ages but also come to different conclusions if you then cover the tall thin glass so this malleability of what we think reality is is something that cognitive psychology was very strongly about in the 50s and 60s another one is when you make something twice as large it goes up by 4 by the square and if you make an odd shape twice as large its volume goes up by a factor of 8 so these things where our brains are terrible at making estimates of things and this is so interesting that I resolved to go visit Seymour and I first visited I think in the fall of 68 and then a few times thereafter I visited Seymour and Seymour were working with children roughly the age of 12 or so there and it was just mind blowing fascinating and in a special way which I'll try and explain in a second so here's what I remember of the syntax of that old logo there's something like that remember that I love this stuff the turtle was a great idea the problem was that it was difficult for people to handle all the things that logo was really wonderful at helping you think at and this was a casualty so this is a nice little program that 12 year olds can write that will turn any English sentence into a piglet and they did many other kinds of things like that and Wally Fertzig who is one of the developers to talk about this so I commend this to you if you're interested and Nicholas mentioned the turtle there here's what it actually looked like it's about this big not terribly accurate it had a magic marker and you ran it around on butcher paper and this is an area and I think the center of this talk is what I'm going to say next about this which is to try to get in the short time I have a little more of an understanding of how large Seymour's ideas were here just why it was so critically important I believe this is the tragedy of logo is that in many ways what was really important about it was people were distracted by for instance that the turtle can make a picture and many installations of logo in schools the teachers had sort of devolved down to just having the kids draw things with the turtle and that was so far from what the idea was so I had a hard time figuring out how to do this but here's the thing that Nicholas mentioned that Seymour would take a kid and say cover your eyes and make a circle with your body and so the kid would do something like this and what are you doing and the only way to explain this is to make a kind of a constellation of ideas I hate bullets and talks but I just couldn't find a way of not doing it so what the kid is doing is actually this because the turtle and the kid are actually a kind of a vector in a kind of mathematics that wasn't invented until the 19th century the kid doesn't know it and doesn't care and doesn't need to know but the kid is doing it and doing this sequentially is adding these things together and you get something like a circle and if you ask the kid what they're doing they say well I'm going a little turning a little over and over and that is almost a logo program if you put it in there a logo will do it and depending on what a little means you'll get something that's more like a polygon or more like a circle so any child can make a better circle out of a polygon than Archimedes could and what's the significance here and the significance is going to run around this slide here well we've got three main kinds of brains for doing thinking we have a body brain that body brain knew how to do a circle even though the kid couldn't tell you it beforehand the kid was able to give the explanation after the eye brain registers what the thing is configuration and the symbolic language brain is a way of expressing something in a way that can be generalized and so you have these multiple descriptions and multiple ways of thinking combined in this simple little exercise that he did and what's cool about it is the extension of this this is cool enough, right because already you're getting a kid to do something and you have to do circles with x squared plus y squared equals r squared try and get a computer to draw a circle with that so concrete abstractions the abstractions are things here they're not off here it's relational but it's also procedural relations are what you can see with your eye and the procedure is what you do with your body so you've got two ways of thinking of geometry now, not just one what this is in adult language is what's called a differential geometry of vectors that happens to be one of the main mathematical languages for all of physical sciences it's what is actually used in favor of standard calculus it's a powerful form an extension of what calculus and geometry originally invented to do embodied in something that is in the wheelhouse of a young child and the child can now do real math because this is a form of thinking that the child can have intuitions about, can do real science can do real computing and we get some powerful, so these are powerful ideas in what the kid is doing now let's extend it out one of the implications here is hey you can start a lot earlier you can start many cases you can start something that involves ideas like calculus used in a cognitive understanding way ten years before calculus is normally used because you don't have to have analytic geometry and you don't have to have algebra Albert North Whitehead said in 1916 that to an address to the mathematical association in UK, he was a great mathematician and he said the tragedy of our times is that calculus is so easy but you have to go through algebra to get to it and the thing is is that calculus does not have anything particularly to do with algebra at all it's a different set of ideas, it's primarily has to do with forms of sequences and additions and additions are what our brains are set up and made for another implication here is real forms of many other powerful ideas can be found that this is actually expressing now something that could be a goal and a purpose, if we want to improve education with children let's not try to teach them watered down adult ideas, what we want is the full power of the adult ideas but put in a form that the children's brains can deal with, you see what the difference is there, it's profound the watered down ideas aren't the thing anymore they just become bullshit but if you can hold on to the full power of what's going on here and make it so a child can start working on it you're putting the child in the real world and the cosmic ideas are what Mitchell used the word epistemological which Seymour used a lot I believe it was a mistake for Seymour to use that word and after this election I'm convinced it's a mistake to use any words that long but it's hard to find a good word short words epistemology is kind of a stance of knowledge of the way you think about the world you're in it's very hard to use circumlocutions for it but what's cool here is that whatever it is it's the version of reality that you retreat to when you're in trouble and so if you learn a common sense version of reality and try to tack science on it when you're older, when you get in trouble you tend to think in these terms that are not going to give you good intuitions where if you learn the powerful ideas early you will retreat to intuitions that are likely to help you a lot more so this is the cosmic idea here and my way of expressing this is point of view is worth ADIQ points by taking the right stance and looking at things all of a sudden it's like you put an extra little brain in your head you're suddenly much smarter much more capable than the geniuses of antiquity just because you have a better perspective to look at things so to summarize all this up I had to do something after all that there because it's a lot of stuff but I can tell you my mind was completely and part of the reason my mind was blown was what I just told you but the other thing and I can see Hal here nodding away everybody who's been through this experience here's the thing every single one of us knew this ahead of time we just didn't know it every computer person everybody who has science knows every goddamn thing here Seymour didn't show me anything I didn't know I just had never thought about what it implied for children that was the thing I'm getting chills just thinking about I can remember this moment for the rest of my life I've realized oh my god I just found a blind spot my brain was filling in the wrong thing so when a child is born they're not born into nothing they're born into something like a culture and so one of Seymour's favorite metaphors was the baby who brought up in France will easily learn to fluence not just fluently speak but to do French to be French and the reason is we're genetically set up for just like we're genetically set up for language we're not so genetically set up to learn a language in a classroom or a culture in a classroom we're terrible at it but put us into a culture and we can't help but accommodate to it that is the way we were set up and Montessori was perhaps the first great education that realized this she said you cannot teach the 20th century in a classroom the school has to be the 20th century that's a powerful idea and so to the culture that we have been brought up in we add a bunch of things we live we're born in a world that realizes there is a world some of us that the world is embedded in an enormous universe that there are social systems it's not just reality you only realize there's a social system when you come in contact with another one and you realize oh yeah they have this way and there are thousands of them that there are technological systems this is a self-portrait of the internet that we are a system this is very very recent modern medicine in many ways dates back certainly to the 20th century and much of it to the middle of the 20th century and that our mental apparatus emotional and intellectual are systems and these systems are connected they show up isolated here but they're actually connected in very interesting ways and we basically have nothing genetically to handle this idea this is a new set of things and it's only been recently that systems has been thought of as a unifying principle for many different kinds of things and so there are systems we live in there are the systems we are Seymour would ask what lands will we be building for the children of the future to grow up in and we should be asking ourselves what kind of culture of powerful ideas must be created because it's not creating the powerful ideas that's going to do it we didn't realize that strongly enough before it's actually creating a culture because it's the only way most people are ever going to learn thank you just focus on mathematics why do we think some people don't have a head for mathematics it's because they didn't learn mathematics in the mathematics classroom but when we go into the French classroom and see how our few children learn French we do not conclude that they do not have a head for French because we know that those very same children if they grew up in France would speak French perfectly so this is a total non sequitur that runs right through the whole thinking about our education people's abilities and who can learn what at one age at what age the problem for mathematics education is not to find a better way of teaching mathematics in the classroom the problem is to find the analog of learning French by growing up in France and that brings us to our next panel rethinking math I'm going to rethink I remember studying math 101 engineering school in a class of 300 shivering students buffalo at 8 o'clock in the morning and squinted a tiny overhead projector I didn't really want to go learn math at that point so you can imagine what I thought about math then but I certainly started learning it on my own since then today we're going to rethink math on a balmy Sunday afternoon so it'll be a nice atmosphere outside and with another panel and again like I said before I'm going to have the panelists introduce themselves starting on that end thank you very much, I have two minutes on me I'm sorry I'm losing my voice I won't speak much my name is Celia Hoyles I'm from London, England and I'm delighted to be here and thank Nicolaus for inviting me I'm going to give a quick two minutes on my life and these are related to when I met Seymour I first met him in 1972 met I think means that he somehow met but I saw him whether he saw me I very much doubt I was at a huge international congress of math education in Exeter in England and actually it was just awesome I was a class from math teacher I was doing all the things I now know I shouldn't have done but I was doing my best in the east end of London and there were these amazing speeches from actually I think Piaget didn't come but he was supposed to come and Freud and Tal and Polya, fantastic lectures all men by the way but I didn't notice that then I was bold over but as I was walking back to where I was saying there was this funny little notice on a tree now this is how I remember it whether it was true I remember it saying this way to the turtle pond somebody would tell me it wasn't that but I followed this path and there were these rather crazy people there was me, I'm an Essex girl I just didn't know much about anything I just knew my maths, I was quite good at that and there in the turtle pond was I think Seymour was Cynthia, was Marvin and they had those turtles that we see moving around all being navigated animation drawing and I just couldn't believe it all crazy, I didn't know what it was going on about but it was something that I never forget and then I just fast forward very quickly I met Seymour again in 1985 and I came to this wonderful place I gave one of the lectures at MIT logo conference because I had a big logo maths project by then but then in 1986 I invited Seymour to come to London to give a keynote at a big congress called psychology and maths education by then I was an important professor and not a teacher but I'm a teacher still at heart and Seymour spoke about beyond the cognitive the other face of mathematics and in fact Sherry Turtle earlier this morning has talked a little bit about those things about the emotional side how many people so often hate it but what I remember about that lecture was that he talked about the Euclidean propositions that we'd all learnt at school I was still teaching at school the circle theorems and he showed if you only thought yourself as a turtle they could all be thought of as one theorem now the interesting thing was that many of us there were completely bowled over by this this was a whole thing we'd never thought of before but equally true and Seymour predicted this too he predicted everything and there was also a lot of people in that audience, mathematicians maths educators who hated it and I just think there's always going to be resistance to new ideas and those were my two memorable experiences I hope I haven't gone too long Thank you Thank you My name is Richard Norse from University College London I think Seymour and I just about represent Europe and when we were preparing for this wonderful event I remember saying to Cedar you know the Americans are going to tease us terribly about Brexit it's interesting that nobody's mentioned it so we're around 1970 something I was studying pure mathematics and teaching social science students something about statistics and I was struck it never hit me before but I was struck not just by the fact that these students who were intelligent people studying intelligent subjects I was struck by how frightened they were it was a visceral fear of number and I couldn't understand it I went and tried to teach in a school and it was clear that I couldn't be a very good teacher because the kids were frightened of maths there they found it very difficult it seemed to me that there was a language issue that somehow the language I was speaking to the kids wasn't the language that they understood and then I left teaching to do a project with these strange little machines called computers was there any role for these machines in school in school mathematics and I came across a book and this isn't the Mindstorm story yet came across a book called Turtle Geometry how Abelson is here somewhere and he says Andy Decessary is not here oh hi how and I read this book and I thought this is a strange book it starts with a definition of a square and a triangle and it makes a house and then you get towards the end and there's a model of general relativity in the same book as drawing a square and a triangle and I didn't quite get it and then I read Mindstorms and then I understood the big idea and it's a big idea which I think over all those years since 1980 has been lost which is it isn't that we're not teaching mathematics terribly well it's that we're teaching the wrong mathematics and Alan alluded to that in the talk that he just gave and there are some wonderful examples and there are some people here who have done this work and there are some wonderful examples of mathematics instantiated in a programming way but it hasn't caught on that's the idea that hasn't caught on with all the millions of kids now doing net logo and scratch and programming many of their teachers are not completely sure why they're learning programming and one of the reasons that I think we I regard it as my duty and some other people here may agree with me that we have to keep alive is that programming is an alternative representational system for thinking about mathematics we had a project that I was co-director of a few years ago which had a tagline algebra is not a very good vehicle for learning algebra and programming is a much better vehicle and if I had another hour or two I would try and convince you of it that's an opportunity I just want to say one other thing which is in a way to be grateful to Seymour about 12 years ago I became director of something called the London Knowledge Lab which was about technology and learning in my university and I phoned up Seymour and I said could you come over he said well if I come over I'm going to just be able to come for the day and he came for the day and as he came in to the Knowledge Lab which had a big logo on the door he put on that face he identifies a point of infinity and focuses on it and you know something important is happening but you're not quite sure what and then he goes into the room of the Knowledge Lab and he looks at the audience and he says the K word is back and the fact that the K word had gone away for quite a long time I think is important and I think rediscovering what the K, why the K is in knowledge and why knowledge is in programming is still an open question and something that I guess we could talk about here thank you Thank you, Yura Hi, I'm Uri Walensky from Northwestern University and I guess I'll tell a little bit of my tale back in the 80s I was a mathematician who actually loved math saw beauty in it saw a lot of it as a fun activity and it came to my attention that a lot of other people didn't feel that way about it that in fact when I went to parties or events and I introduced myself as a mathematician I often got a rolling of eyes and something like I can't even balance my checkbook that was the notion of mathematics and it made me very sad that people came to know mathematics as this memorization of formulas and application of them when there were so many ideas that I found beautiful and helpful and useful in understanding the world well at that time I read Mindstorms and hopped across the river to meet with Seymour and we talked for hours and my life was changed dramatically changed and I started a conversation with him that continued for a very long time and in some ways continues to this day and you know I started to reconceptualize mathematics as a language for modeling the world for understanding the world something that humans make something that is just there that we're supposed to use and memorize and apply but something that we are engaged in in trying to make sense of the world and Seymour and I began a project around 2005 or so where we were going to write a series of papers on the power of making representations and how these representations computational representations can greatly change the way we think about mathematics as a modeling and that we can actually make a difference in the world that we can participate in the world by asking questions and be part of a culture that talks about these things so we were in a hotel in Hanoi writing about this we were also attending a mathematics conference and tragically as we were having this incredibly passionate conversation and crossing the street he got hit by a motor scooter and went into a coma for a very long time in Hanoi and in some ways that conversation stopped and I missed it terribly but now I had the privilege of mentoring many students and watching them go out into the world and continue these ideas and I know Seymour would be extremely happy to see how many people are carrying on those kinds of ideas and seeing mathematics and modeling and ideas as powerful and creating a culture of that which is very needed right now next up Pam I like your shoes Hal they're identical come on they're cheap they're thrifty thrifty my name is Hal my name is Hal Abelson I teach computer science here at MIT I'll follow a student saying how I got into this game I showed up at MIT in 1969 as a mathematics graduate student and that was the fall on one of the very most salutary things that's ever happened at MIT happened which is that the students rioted for the students for democratic society took over the president's office so I was sitting on the floor in the president's office and ran into a friend I knew and he said what are you doing and I said I'm a new graduate student is there anything interesting to do and he said well this artificial intelligence lab has a lot of interesting things to do you heard Sherry Turkle's beautiful beautiful talk at lunchtime about how it's really all about elevators and that was true for me also because I was standing in the artificial intelligence lab and the elevator door opened and there was Seymour who I sort of barely knew who he was and he said who are you I said I'm a new math graduate student I'd like to work at the AI lab and he said who would you like to work for and I said I'd like to work for you and that was 45 years ago and I'm still in this game that's great where would you like to be 45 years I mean a new one that came out was the wrong one I tell that story by the way to my students who are so concerned right now with planning out their lives because I think there's a real message there about the importance of randomness but we but we can talk about that mathematical concept absolutely mathematical randomness where we're speaking of I'm intrigued by talking about we're teaching math the wrong way I mean what's the what would be a better way or a better progression or how to best approach math of a rethinking math any of you want to jump in I'll say one thing I mean he mentioned randomness and you know we tend to the concept of randomness can be very very powerful for us we can use it to do things in the world whether it's to make some kind of colorful art piece or to get a robot to get unstuck by moving it in some random ways but we don't introduce it that way we introduce it as fractions and about ways of like counting very large numbers but if you use something like a random variable random in logo you can build with it you can construct with it and you understand it to usefulness and not just some decontextualized set of practices and formulas that you memorize could I just say a little thing I don't really think it's up for us to say how we should teach things I think because we have a whole lot of teachers who are doing wonderful jobs still it's very easy for us to say what should happen but and there's still some wonderful teachers who are still hearing about Simo's ideas either through his writing or through us or through his grad students and whatever and what they have to do is realize that there is an alternative way that their children, the students can rethink because when Simo was talking he was talking about one computer sometimes in a classroom now everybody has a device in their hands they can really harness this power and I could take you to schools in my country where they are doing wonderful things in terms of teaching mathematics I've actually got this little video that I'm obviously not going to show of a school in East London it's a very deprived area there are the kids doing wonderful things with our project which is using programming scratch scratch with maths and the head teacher is saying they're not just doing arithmetic which is what all they do all the time procedures and now they're reasoning through programming which is what we were all talking about so I still think it's still not happening and it's happening in our schools as we speak I just want to add one point and this is a point that I learned completely from Simo which is that the mathematics that we teach and undergraduates too is in a sense arbitrary it happens to be that mathematics that is approachable with a certain kind of technology that follows from a certain kind of culture and so on and it doesn't have any internal rationale except that it used to be that way so here's a very quick example everybody learns about constant velocity before they learn about acceleration why? because one is algebraically one is simpler than the other and that seems to be a sensible thing to do but in fact anybody who's ever been in a car knows something about acceleration everybody here knows why it feels as if you don't feel as if you're getting faster as you go around a corner but something is changing and that's the thing that we call acceleration why don't we teach acceleration before velocity of questions like that that there is very very little research being done on so we need more you talked about your love for math I had a 10th grade math teacher who every day came into the classroom and said I love math and you were going to love it before you leave my classroom too and we thought he was crazy but we did he was teaching geometry the beauty of geometry why not something we don't teach in science and math is we don't teach kids why it's important what it's used for we just teach the mechanics of it we don't teach you how to appreciate what it does it's almost like we expect to be mathematicians we teach music we don't expect you to be yo-yo ma or whatever but we teach you how to appreciate it and why it's important in our culture why don't we teach math the same way first and maybe kids will then say hey you know there's something here well we should there are many reasons for it some that are cultural and some that are historic but as Richard just said the actual set of practices that we actually teach is in a sense arbitrary and Seymour had a very wonderful metaphor that just speaks to a mathematician but maybe not to everybody that you could imagine a space of all the possible math educations where every point was a math education and he said we were such a narrow region of that space there's so much area to explore that could be useful to people and that a child could mathmatize something trying to understand what fishing holes to try or not to try or why their neighborhood might be segregated or integrated all those things can make sense of math as opposed to a set of and then you're motivated maybe to learn some procedures if you can understand that they're actually going to be important to you making a difference how was that what turtle geometry was sort of an attempt at so turtle geometry is a program that my colleague Andy De Cessa who's now at Berkeley and I carried out in trying to push through how much of mathematics could we actually cover through logo and as was said it kind of started with drawing a square and ended up with doing three-dimensional geometry and general relativity and it sort of was that logo reformulating math program so having said that let me criticize that and let me respond to what was said about the content doesn't matter and what you said about your 10th grade teacher because it's not about the mathematics it's about the intellectual empowerment as I said I started logo in 1969 it's hard to appreciate how radical it was in 1969 to say that computers should be used by kids and it's hard to appreciate the sense of almost mischief and empowerment that we were doing in the AI lab by saying these giant department of defense funded computers some of the most powerful computers in the world what we do with them is we have the 11 year olds in Lexington using them and there was this wonderful sense of empowerment and mischief one thing we said to ourselves in the early 70s is that gosh if a computer could only cost a thousand dollars then all of the education would be transformed so of course it didn't work out like that it turned out to be more complicated but that vision of transformation was something that we articulated through mathematics not sure why, maybe because Seymour was a mathematician many of us in the program were mathematicians and we saw this sort of love in ourselves for this insane thing and the idea that you could make an environment where kids and other people could start to experience that kind of love was enormously compelling for us so it was more than just mathematics it was the notion that you were looking at a source of intellectual empowerment for kids in teaching children thinking which Seymour wrote in 1971 the first articulation of Logan he talked about kids coming to see themselves as empowered and as empowered intellectual agents did they actually feel empowered? well you have to really ask because the question is did the kids feel empowered and some of them said wonderful wonderful things or was it really us saying gosh Alan told me to say something about differential geometry that they were using this thing and we say oh gosh they are experiencing something about differential geometry it might have been us enthusiastic naive in education researchers and naive graduate students imposing that on there but they are sort of two different two very very related ideas there is this notion of reformulating math which is the kind of thing that logo did the kind of thing that Andy and I did in turtle geometry and then there is this notion of intellectual empowerment and as Alan mentioned one of Seymour's guiding metaphors was this notion of math land and one of the opportunities that we saw ourselves having is how do you construct that kind of math land where kids can kind of visit there you go visit math land and you learn you just imbibe these ideas the thing I wanted to say today that's different is that was 45 years ago and that's changed and what we did not appreciate in the logo days was the sense in which that computer formal mathematics world formal computing world was going to become the real world and I want to say something about looking ahead from where we are because in logo days you talk about going to the computer to do something we don't go to the computer anymore the computer is with us my super computer is right here and we don't understand the extent to which the analogy of that math land that math culture that computing culture is already with us as Alan talked about a culture we may not like what's happening there but it is one of the things we need to appreciate is in that culture kids can be empowered they can do things that are not only expression of intellectual ideas but they can do things that actually change the world around them there's an example that came out yesterday of three eighth graders in Wisconsin who wrote an app for their school which counteracts bullying because if you're bullied you send a message to a teacher and it records this and helps you do it there's the 13 year olds in Daravi which is in India which is one of the largest slums in Asia where there are 13 year olds who are writing an app in their community so the families can schedule time at the communal water distribution plant there are kids in Winchester who are writing an app and their quiz and advises you about in high school about whether you're too drunk to drive so the point is what we started in logo as thinking about this abstract world where you could be intellectually empowered we have to realize that now kids can be not only intellectually empowered but actually empowered in their world and that's where I think we need to go with this to understand and really celebrate our logo and now say that math land we don't have to build it we're there is there a natural extension of logo now something like it well not to advertise I'm making something like logo or he's making something that's in exactly the same spirit in my view what we would have made of logo if there were iPhones in 1970 but it's that sense of you can actually make something that people can use so you know network everybody's network together right I mean we keep forgetting how powerful this gadget is this is more powerful than anything anybody had except I think maybe NASA for the entire moon mission had something which was equivalent to the power in this or maybe that was only last year's thing in the real world one of the leveling things about current computer and information technology is that the powerful tools are there to the extent that even the middle school students can do things that are significant in their world and that I think is the place we're going to go yeah I want to make a kind of dissension to that kind of dissension of dissent it's obviously true that Hal has a supercomputer in his pocket absolutely true that potentially the computing power that everybody has is quite unlimited and so on but that doesn't change the world because the culture that goes with most of that technology is to close it down and keep it secret and make money out of it it's not to make it so that people can see how it works and become intellectually empowered that's not to say that the world shouldn't be but that's the way it is so we have a big job to do to try and as it were democratize oh I think that's true I like to talk about people talk about computational thinking I like to say there's computational thinking there are computational values what is it about the world where these computational ideas can have power like having a lot of free software like having openness to databases so people can do it those are computational values and then I like to talk about computational actions which is what I was just saying that even middle school students can do things that are significant because of the richness of this equivalent math world that we are already in that doesn't say there are no problems there certainly are I couldn't possibly agree with you more but it's an enormous opportunity to play the game in the real world and see kids playing the game in the real world I want to add one thing I mean we all of us have an image of math from math class which are about shuffling certain symbols around or drawing various figures of various sorts but as we were talking about in the conversation here Seymour was working with us to expand the notion of what that is and that computation plays an essential role as a new representational system and the idea is that there are things that are hard for us as Alan mentioned our brain isn't always good at certain things but we build tools to do them if we have a tree that we can't chop down we build an axe but there are intellectual tools that we build and that we are in control of that help us understand the world better and there is so much complexity that we have to deal with in the world now and wouldn't it be great if we had a culture where we could reason together and talk together about these things with this kind of structure I'd settle for a culture just talk civilly and teaching civics now at that point which we don't do anymore can I make just one quick one really is it's only following up what we said if I had to say one thing to rethink maths is for all the people all the mathematicians I don't know what we mean by a mathematician there are mathematicians working in all sorts of fields and somehow a mathematician is always stereotyped as a professor of maths and it's usually a man we have to break out of that stereotype and all the people who are working in maths across all sorts of industry and commerce they have to declare themselves and then we will see that mathematics is a much richer subject okay thank you go see hidden figures you'll like hidden figures on that but thank you all panel very much for taking time to be with us today next up where's Suzanne excuse me I saw you look at your watch while I was talking I was talking about methylene go sit there absolutely now who's going to introduce me you are just on my phone because this is will be my last interview of the day because I have to go back and do a radio show but I'm very happy to spend it with you how kind thank you and of course you know Suzanne Matthew Pepper yes you can say hi Mary to see more for 24 years 29 I could get my facts checking my facts and you have an incredible background as interpreter of Russian culture recognized by the U.S. and Russia as a builder of bridges between the two countries and I don't know if the audience knows about the phrase you came up with Ronald Reagan, talk a little bit about that well I did I did teach him the phrase trust but verify which has now become an American phrase which is very nice but it just happened at lunchtime before Reykjavik I said well Mr. President you know the Russians often like to express themselves in proverbs and there's one that might come in handy in your talks and I said it's trust but verify well he leapt on it as did Mrs. Reagan and they both loved it and then I said you're an actor you'll be able to learn to pronounce it in two minutes and I taught him and then I sent it to him on a card with the right accents anyway it's wonderful now it's become an American like on an American lexicon and the Russians have always been very mused that it's actually a Russian proverb that's a great story how would you describe your marriage with Seymour do you have a way of summing it up well I realize that I'm sort of the Seymour at home person after hearing everything today one can only be very humble about that but I can tell you some stories about Seymour as a husband and first of all I want to say that I think we were the odd couple I mean nobody we were so different in so many ways first of all I hated mathematics and I knew nothing about mathematics and I failed it whenever I took it so I'm the best example of how badly it was taught I think but anyway I didn't like mathematics and I know I did sense that some of his colleagues really wondered how he could be slumming by marrying somebody who was a historian so we were we were really the odd couple and I know that when we first were keeping company I kept saying to him you're not my type and he looked at me because I thought MIT and he would look at me and say well maybe it's time for you to try a new type well I did and we had 29 wonderful precious years and I never ceased to admire ever his great mind his humility and that's the mark of all great men and it's very rare his sense of humour his love of life his endless curiosity his lifelong thirst for learning about everything and anything I mean he had it seemed to me the fresh love of discovery and the innocent eagerness for learning of a super brilliant child or the genius that he was and all his life for instance he was an inveterate buyer and collector of books now it was books of all kinds from any kind you might think I've heard a book on it how to play baseball how to speak Japanese how to do Chinese cooking about history, about biographies about philosophy he had maps he had jokes from all over the world and what he did when we moved to Maine these went all to the most complicated mathematical books and statistics books and books that I couldn't even read at all well indeed when we moved to Maine 12,000 pounds of our move with books gives you an idea and he was constantly, constantly investigating and once he just decided he told me that he was flower challenged well he decided he was going to learn about that that he didn't know the difference between a tulip and a peony so he started because he noticed that in Maine there was this flower that grew a lot it was called a lupin a wolf's tail and of course he discovered very quickly that it had been called a wolf's tail because people thought that it ate the soil because you know it grew along the street around it was dry, wrong absolutely wrong it was because it actually fed the soil lupins disappear after a while after they fed the soil well that started it so he got into this more and more and more and to my alarm I mean we'd be driving along a road and he would suddenly stop in the middle of the road just stop, jump out and run over to the side of the road to find a new specimen that he saw well he finally in his whole search he had a different specimens in our own field and he learned all the Latin definitions of them and on top of it ever after that he would choose and compose the most beautiful florist bouquets for our anniversaries and our birthdays knowing all the flowers himself well he also, there were many things I mean he was such an inveterate learner and also of course he adored children and when we went to have cocktails sometimes in Maine with friends, he didn't really like that so much all the children would always come and take him by the hand and take him away and he'd disappear and you'd find him on the floor usually with him if you did but the thing that was amazing they all called him Seymour and the parents, one parent said it was very shocked, they thought it was great to call such a famous professor Seymour until they found out that the children saw it that every household, it was a title like grandfather and every household had a Seymour I buy it I thought it was pretty good too who took out the garbage he did that too he also never tied his shoes ever and I would always say to him tie your shoes because you're going to fold down and break that beautiful nose no, he never did and we had a bookkeeper and her size was I think about 10 at the time and she'd say, tie your shoes and he'd say, huh, Seymour is a genius and he doesn't tie his shoes did he ever get in trouble for that? no, no and he never tripped, that's the amazing thing he never tripped but you know when Bakwak came to take they were taking for the computer museum Bakwak, I saw him he was just clearing his throat a little bit all the time and finally I said, you know he finally looked up at Seymour and said, would you mind tying your shoes and he finally did but I could never change that habit of him, never, never he also, more things, because living with him was never dull he wanted to learn to dance now I love ballet and I danced and I myself studied ballet for a long time and I adore ballet and so we went to a lot of ballet and I loved music and as Todd told you Seymour really started to learn music, I bought him books about music and mathematics and all sorts of things and he did want to learn to dance the trouble is dancing is about feeling, about feeling he was counting, counting, counting so it was really hard you can't do a wall if you're counting all the time and then the other thing was he wanted to sing he so much wanted to sing so he joined a local choir a small choir well of course the sweet man he was tone deaf absolutely tone deaf doesn't go well with a choir not really, but he tried he tried so hard and he kept doggedly trying and finally the choir decided that he was so plucky and so cheery that the named him actually Darren Mascot Darren Mascot and when we were in Russia we spent three and a half months in Russia doing lots of wonderful things but anyway his teacher there explained to him that singing was a great way to learn Russian and so I would hear him all the time singing Russian off-key of course but always so happy happy we had so many adventures together I must say we went to so many countries and we enjoyed so much all the time I don't mean to rub I'm running short but did you ever notice where Seymour did his best thinking oh yes I think he did his best thinking in the office he had in the learning barn he would stay there sometimes he would work all night I mean really all night but it wasn't in the shower or while driving in his office see he had this intense power of concentration when he went into his concentration nothing he heard nothing and you didn't know I mean he was lost in that concentration you could see the smoke coming out of his ear not quite Seymour I loved he was so funny that was one of the great things he had just such a great sense of humor and always knew how to make a joke on one word well we don't have time for me to tell you all those stories so I won't tell them but well read it in your book maybe but anyway he was also enormously generous that's another thing I admired about him he always thought about money ever ever never which not so good absolutely never he had only one really persistent thought in mind he always thought about those two billion children in the world that had no education that was his ambition his hope his lifetime hope he invited all kinds of things you know a computer that worked like a sewing machine computer feed I mean all kinds of things and he was always thinking I mean about that but when he went into his thinking mode nothing that was fine I didn't mind but anyway his generosity is he used to work so hard on recommendations for people and one professor always said why do you do that Seymour I've got paragraphs you know that I do work three days four days and I'm told that there was never anybody who has turned down after a letter Seymour you worked on writing it so personally it was wonderful anyway it really was in a way that his generosity that brought him down in the end at the time he was working on one thing he said we are foolish to try to make children love math what we have to do is give them mathematics they can love that's what he was working on and he was halfway through a book about education in the 21st century when he went away to give a keynote address and he was hit by a motorcycle crossing the street but you know he had just called me before and those were his last words he said I'm afraid to cross the street and I honestly have often well felt very guilty about that I had only been there I would have ordered him a taxi and that unfortunately I wasn't there but in any case he narrowly escaped that's really narrowly I mean he was so brave always always and then when he returned to America he was in a coma and this I wanted to tell you all about because most of you don't really know much about what happened in those nine and a half years afterwards he came back from America to America in a special Swiss plane that saved him John Kerry sent the National Guard to pick him up he was in coma for quite a long time when he took him up to Maine he could only babble nobody knew what his life was going to be all I can tell you is that if he did miracles about learning before that I told you and this was the triumph of his life he was extraordinary he never stopped learning not one second all the time so he had to re-teach himself he had to re-teach everything and you know at first nobody knew whether he would ever speak again or anything nobody had any idea the Mayo Clinic said that you know most people don't use their brains but he had such a disciplined one and that regular rehab wouldn't help him and nobody knew what to do doctors didn't know what to do and so he but he, I've never met I've never seen a more courageous person in my life he never complained he could have complained of course but he never complained he just set about to be learning everything an Italian movie maker who came to see him there was a short period out of the coma until he got sepsis where he was sometimes talking quite well and she interviewed him and she said isn't it very difficult to have to re-learn everything and he said oh no it's very exciting well he did he learned how to walk he learned how to chew he could speak now he never ever regained his beautiful speaking he could never have done those lectures anymore that way but he relearned and you know sometimes I had the feeling he was looking at himself relearning at the end and he was working every day he relearned he learned how to read he read all the newspapers everything and he read anything he wanted to read but he could not explain himself he never did get back to the computer and it didn't frustrate him no what was really marvelous I bought him a lot of these lectures by prominent professors so he had a working schedule every day 9.30 to about 2.30 and he would want these professors sometimes you'd hear him laughing and he'd say you'd hear him say laugh laugh laugh and you'd hear he'd laugh and but or otherwise sometimes you watched him with that concentration his earphones on looking at that Skyping was absolutely a miracle he Skyped with some of his colleagues David Cavallo showed him his class he Skyped and saw the classes in Brazil, in Sweden in other countries he Skyped with many people his wonderful form but I have to mention Rick Goldblatt from the lab the artificial intelligence lab who suddenly appeared and for years Skyped with him at least twice a week taught him went through many many exercises changing them brain exercises all the time so faithfully and so generously George Markowski came you see unfortunately Cambridge was quite far away and there weren't very many people that came up from there but Maine people were wonderful he did extraordinary work in Maine and George Markowski who is here today came every single month to have lunch with him and to talk to him and to work with him and others very wonderful people Damian Bebell and others from Maine would come to see him and of course he loved at the end I mean I tell you all of the life he loved parties he liked birthday parties, he loved them he had a wonderful time in them he loved balloons, funny toys adored funny toys, great tops and all sorts of things and of course he loved visitors, especially ladies now he always had had quite a weak spot for the fair sex and in fact he always said that the thinking of women was much more interesting than the thinking of men and so so when they came and I don't care what age, little, big, old and he wide smiles and he'd always say how wonderful to see you and then he'd say when do I see you again and I always thought it was very good for his health so I tried to get as many ladies to come as he could and they did I have a word for that but I'm not going to use it yes I know that's alright anyway I will just end by saying first of all, those were precious years we were very, very happy we really had wonderful life together and I had long, long, long, I never had such long conversations with anybody we talked about the Bible we talked about religion we talked about everything and he often recited he loved Shakespeare's son poetry was his great love and he would recite them to me before we went to sleep my heart and that's amazing now very few people in the world can say that they have changed the world that we live in but he did it and he did it and he was so humble about it and his visionary predictions which sometimes we laugh at about cell phones or anything robots that would do work and everything and the omnipresence of the computer for which I don't always bless him I have to tell you and anyway and much more that he predicted have come true and it's going to affect the future that we live in and I know if he hadn't been stopped a little bit short what he could have done there would have been more but I have to say that for me losing him was well like extinguishing the bright light that illuminated my life and also I know illuminated the life of millions of learners all over the world Suzanne, Matthew, thank you very much thank you thank you great words see you all on Friday okay, are we on? hello, I'm Ira Flato I have a radio program that I've been doing Ira had to catch the train back so you get the dregs of me introducing Danny and then the panel will introduce self and I won't give people time to get in the room so we get on to schedule my introduction of Danny is really metaphorically an introduction of Joey and I think I saw Joey in the room, are you here Joey? yes, you are here well in the early days before the media lab existed I went to Japan all the time and because of Jerry Wiesner all of these media tycoons chairman of Sony the chairman of would bring this kid around to show how cool they were and it was Joey I met Joey it seems like half a dozen but it was maybe only three times with these very important people and he was their connection now why am I telling you that Marvin and Seymour had a Joey who was Danny I think Danny when I knew you you were 16 something like that 15 maybe so I'm going to introduce you as Marvin and Seymour's Joey honored by that introduction let's start by doing an experiment so first of all you have to each choose a lab partner that's the fun part if one of you gets left out because the people next to you choose a different lab partner then we can do it with three but it's better with two so pick somebody to be your lab partner and then get your program out if you can't find a program Alan's reality kit will work better to have a program so here's the experiment we're going to do and you're going to take turns doing it basically it's going to be an experiment of putting your hands around the program dropping it and catching it but your partner is going to do the dropping or you're going to do the catching so and then I want you to switch and I want you to do it a few different times so just try it now be sure everybody gets both a chance to drop and catch ok so this is a true experiment I actually don't know how it's going to come out ok that's probably enough to start with we'll do some more experiments later so just out of curiosity how many of you got better at it as you did more of it that you caught it more often ok so many of you did if you think of that that almost doesn't make sense because it ought to be just a matter of reaction time or something like that you probably got better at seeing a cue when it was going to be dropped or maybe lowering your hand as you grabbed it or something like that and you probably cheated to get better somehow and you probably didn't consciously cheat and you probably didn't even think about how you got better you just got better and the amazing thing about the human mind is that pretty much anything that we do over and over again we get better at we learn, there's a learning curve and it doesn't matter if something is obscure is speaking in iambic pentameter or a very difficult task that most of us learn to do which is learning to recognize little scribble signs on a piece of paper and translating those into words there are things that obviously we don't have built in hardware to do no advantage to a chimpanzee to be able to speak in iambic pentameter or a caveman or what the things we're evolved from there's probably no advantage to be able to ride or ride a bicycle or launch a rocket ship or any of those things from a luxury standpoint but what was an advantage is we clearly developed this very general purpose thinking machine that got good at whether we think about it or not we get better doing things over and over again we're a universal learner for some amazing reason which I don't think any of us understand and I want to talk about one aspect of Seymour because to me it was kind of a unique aspect about it and I've never seen anybody else like this but Seymour was constantly experimenting on himself to do things to see what that process was what was it exactly he was learning when he learned to be a juggler he didn't just say I'm getting better and better at juggling he was like why did I just suddenly get better why did I just suddenly get worse he tried to deconstruct that process and he tried to you saw interviews of him asking kids or you've heard about him asking kids what were you thinking, how did that feel and he was constantly learning new things so you've heard stories about all the books Seymour read and things like that I was lucky enough a couple of times to move into houses that Seymour had abandoned and he generally abandoned them with whatever he had been learning it would be the books on Chinese flower arrangement or Japanese flower arrangement some obscure form of cooking or how helicopters worked and there'd be the unicycle he was obviously trying to learn to play that in the kazoo and you'd see all this and then there would be the book on learning to write a unicycle and so I would get to just try some of the things he was learning and realize that he was just constantly in that mode and in fact I was lucky enough to first start working with him in very much the way that he worked with a six year old of I really knew nothing about the project I was working on for him and we were doing something new so it was like figuring it out and looking at thinking so I from the beginning had the relationship with him that he had with a six year old not the relationship that he had with another researcher and interestingly enough because of that he would treat a six year old as a peer because the six year old was doing the thing that he was doing which is learning about the world trying to construct the world trying to understand and figure things out whereas generally his peers on paper were people who had already figured out the world and were trying to convince everybody else what they had figured out and so he tended to treat them as people who needed to be talked out of their delusions whereas the six year olds he tended to treat as peers there were exceptions Marvin Minsky he treated as a peer but Marvin has a lot in common with a six year old that was a and so that was a wonderful thing about him and so I think that that notion of seeing yourself as an experimental apparatus was something he often took to an extreme and he did things like wear the prism glasses that caused you to reverse everything for a week and then when you take them off everything is reversed again he was always learning to samba dance or trying to learn to sing and things like that and he wasn't necessarily good at it but he actually loved to see the process of learning and what it was like to be bad at something which is why he connected with the six year old so well and why he connected with me so well because we were working together on things that I didn't understand at all am I working together? it's like he worked together with the six year olds so that was always the wonderful thing and it was always a mystery of him sort of deconstructing and thinking about his own thinking with that great experimental laboratory he had in his head so I think that is one of the things that I'd like to for me it was a great gift to recognize that if you're interested in thinking you have the most amazing laboratory that you carry around with you all the time and it's really useful by the way in lectures when you get bored you can play with this laboratory if you're not interested in what's being said so what I'm going to do is start just as a simple example and show you a kind of playing and I'll show you a specific thing that I did some of this with Seymour and I think it'll give you an example of some of these abstractions people have been talking about about for instance body intelligence and things like that and this is the kind of thing Seymour actually did and so I'll start you on it but it's something you can keep on doing anytime you get interested or bored or in something else so it's kind of so it's going to be about counting, counting things in your head so first of all everybody in their mind count the numbers allowed don't actually say them but think one, two, three everybody understand what I mean by counting in your head okay did anybody get up over 50 good you're doing it right okay so the question is I'm going to, okay does everybody know twinkle twinkle little star how I wonder what you are above all the world so bright like a diamond in the night something like that however you know it it doesn't matter so here's what I'd like you to do I'm going to do things now I'm also I'm going to be saying a bunch of things and I will occasionally say the word Seymour okay when I clap my hands and I want you to count the number of times that I say the word Seymour but simultaneously with that what I want you to do is I want you to count the number of syllables in that poem so for instance twinkle that's two little that's two plus two is four so go through like that while you're setting the poem in your mind but also keep track of the number of times that I say Seymour and then we'll end when I clap my hands the second time everybody get the exercise you're counting two things at once the number of syllables in the poem and the number of times that I say Seymour five seven six Seymour three Seymour 14 Seymour Seymour eight twenty Seymour five okay does everybody have two numbers in their head the number of times that no didn't think so it's kind of impossible to do right Eric okay let's try something else let's think of could we learn to do this could we learn to do this a completely different way so let's do one count let's think of different ways of counting other than saying the numbers in our head okay here's how I want you we'll pick a different point Mary had a little lamb everybody know it everybody all the way to and everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go okay okay so same thing again but this is the way you're going to count the syllables so let's do it with twinkle use your fingers okay put your fingers on your legs okay and you first when you say twinkle twinkle little star how like that and then what? because you've already done that one oh let's do Mary had a little lamb I'm sorry you're right I didn't want to give that as an example so you would have a head start on it but you will do that with Mary had a little lamb okay and then when you get to the end of ten move your hands down a little bit and do it again and then turn and do it again okay and the way that I want you to count the sea moors is you see these squares behind me in your mind the first time I say it look at the first square the second time I say it look at the second square don't count it as the second square just look at that square when it's all over you can count how many squares you went over and when it's all over you can look at what finger you were on okay does that make sense? it's complicated but you're doing two different ways of counting one you're going to kind of use your fingers and then you're going to kind of use your eyes to put things places and you're never going to say a number to yourself afterwards you're going to look at your fingers and you're going to look at how many squares okay we'll try it I don't know if it's going to work but we'll try and it's Mary had a ready four five six Seymour seven eight four Seymour seven four eight Seymour four three two one five three one two I'll stop there in your mind look at your fingers where they are how many times you went through them and how many of you have some idea of how many syllables or Mary have a little lamb most of you just have curiosity how many got 26 I got many people I don't know that's right that's just what I got I was doing it too okay what about the number of times I said Seymour how many people got how many times I said Seymour so okay so so the interesting thing is that was a sort of a trick of trying to use different parts of your brain to offload the counting function rather than your normal verbal counting because your verbal thing was being used to recite Mary had a little lamb so this is an interesting experiment you can keep on going with you can keep on finding tricky ways of counting multiple things at once and this is actually something I do do when I'm bored in a lecture is I try to find multiple things to count and see how many streams of counting I can manage to keep up myself I can visual part of my brain or the musical part of my brain or the motor part of my brain and it's a game but that's exactly the kind of game that would engage Seymour that's the kind of conversation that he would love because as soon as you had a conversation with that you were a research collaborator with him and that's exactly the kind of collaborator he was with the six year olds that you saw in the picture he was getting to think about themselves how thinking worked and really exploring that amazing capacity we have for constructing in our brain some reality of the world by this mechanism that's so fabulously general and magical so that's a very simple kind of example now he had much more sophisticated things than this was just I picked something I could go through in a couple of minutes but always had the interaction that when you finished talking with Seymour you always felt smarter and it wasn't necessarily that he taught you something but what he did is he taught you that you had some capacity to explore things that you maybe didn't notice that you had and he led you in interaction and maybe this is an interesting thing to explore and things like that and that ability to make us all feel smarter made us the people around him love him even when he experimented on us in a place that sometimes were difficult because this experiment he did in his whole life he did in his social interactions with people he did in decided what would it be like if I violated this societal convention what would happen if I didn't tie my shoes what would he was constantly doing that and sometimes some of those experiments worked out and some of them didn't sometimes they made it difficult for the people around him and they didn't but people put up with those difficulties because he made them so much smarter and he made all of us smarter so I'm really grateful to have had the chance to have been around him and I'm grateful to have had a chance to talk today thank you very much logo classes at the our part of a Senegalese government project but does it make sense for an African country to experiment with giving children computers I believe that computers can succeed here where all other media have failed miserably they offer a way out of the vicious circle of scientific weakness in a culture breeding scientific weakness generation I've watched these children become involved with computers with the same ease and the same difficulties as in London or New York or Paris we're rethinking the world so we have an enormous topic and we have 30 minutes so with the permission of the panel I'm going to be very clear about guiding you when you reach the original three minutes that we suggested and then we'll have a bit more of an open conversation my name is Bob Massey I'm the Executive Director of the Sustainable Solutions Lab at UMass Boston but in the context of this gathering I was had the privilege of seeing more steps on for almost 30 years and had the opportunity to get to know him through that relationship today we have an extraordinary panel and from including Clotilde Fonseca from Costa Rica and Fatimata Silla from Senegal David Cavallo who's doing work in Brazil and Jacqueline Azlanian who is now in Armenia and we are going to explore the question about Seymour's impact on the world and we had a conversation beforehand about what focusing question we might use so the focusing question that I think we came up with is how did Seymour help you rethink the world and allow you to talk a bit about your project but you're going to have to fit your self introduction and all the other into the three minutes and then we will come back through so would you like to start well first of all let me say that I am celebrating tremendously this memorial because to borrow Dylan Thomas' words I did not want to see Seymour go gentle into that good night I really believe that his ideas I don't know if they should rage but certainly they should burn and enlighten the development of educational transformation in many places in the world would you just tell them your name my name is Clotilde Fonseca and I met Seymour in 1987 and we worked from there in the development of a project that brought not only computers but a new educational culture to Costa Rican schools with a priority in the inner city and rural schools this was a project that arose as a result of a campaign promise of President Oscar Arias and there was an international bid and I came to the media lab to see what you were doing here with Seymour and his team and then we went to other places to see other projects the media lab which was the company that was doing the work, the consultancy work with Seymour won the bid and this became a major educational transformation for the country the first thing that I would like to say is that Seymour used to say that there is no change without risk and if there is something that came into this project was the capacity of Seymour to risk working with us and our capacity to risk working with him it was at a time when resistance to logo and to the constructionist philosophy was at its high the idea, the prevailing idea was that you needed 15 MIT media lab PhDs to bring computers to children particularly in the developing world and as this project developed I learned to work with Seymour and to work with the community that Seymour was a part of and that he had created so I cannot think about Seymour without thinking about Nicholas Mitch and Brian and Edith and Jacqueline and David and so many other people who were part of this team that had a vision that had clear ideas about what had to be done and that trusted us to work with them to bring this into reality in a poor developing agricultural country in Central America That's three minutes Okay I started working with Seymour and Nicholas in France in 1982 then at the media lab and at the media lab I had also the incredible privilege of working with Todd Mcover and Marcel and Gloriana Davenport and Edith Ackerman really I can go on with these incredibly exceptional people and also in the field very much with Fatou and David and a lot of you here in the audience In 2009 I was offered the possibility of starting a new kind of learning foundation in Armenia the President and Prime Minister at the time trusted me to design and launch this foundation and the idea was to create a new generation of critical thinkers that were going to see change in the country So I've been working at this foundation for now seven years and there are 500 scholars who studied in the most amazing learning environments and centers of excellence around the world most of all they learn to be aware of each other's skills and potential and to think how they're going to make their talent to change the country What I focused on is the process of creating networks of network and also nurturing a particular part of the work which is how you transition from academic accomplishments to real life achievements and how you build communities of learners so that they can transform themselves and the collective in the process of transforming communities and the country What I have learned from Simo is over 27 years of seeing him put learning learning in practice and what we have to be aware of is learning doesn't happen as an isolated process so we are the gift that I think he gave all of us and it's actually each of us to one another and I feel very much connected to all of you and I think that the world in a way it's also in this audience so one more point if I may is the most powerful thing that I saw him teach us how to trust yourself and to trust your peers so that you can shed the fear and embrace the most amazing challenges get out of your comfort zone and take on challenges whether they are very small or very large and that's how you change the world Thank you Thank you I would like to say hello to everybody and thank everybody and I feel very blessed to be here today as an African woman who had the privilege of working with Simo and this was since 1981 with the event of Saint-Moniel the L'informatique my name is Fatimata Seisila and Simo was connected to Dr. Jacques Duf he was the minister of scientific and technical research in Senegal and they decided to set up a computer lab computers use of computers in education to improve learning and teaching for a different way of learning in a different way of teaching as we all know that Simo's paradigm was very different from what was happening at that time and I was selected to lead the research lab within the Econormal Superior of Dakar and we flew from Dakar with all the university teachers to New York and to work with Simo within the computer lab LCSI New York and after that we went back and we visited Saint-Moniel having the visit of Nicholas Negroponte Simo Pappert Bob Mall was there too and we did extraordinary research teachers, primary school students within this lab changing the whole learning paradigm teaching paradigm where teachers and students would work together with exchange all those things Mitch talked about this morning about passion about fears and mostly about sharing and after two years of running this project well I wanted to go back and do my master's degree and I was thinking about going back to France to do that and when Nicholas and Simo heard about that they said what you want to do your computer science degree you have to go to the best school in the world why don't you try to go to MIT I said well, I don't know and thanks to Nicholas, thanks to Simo thanks to Bob Mall and thanks to all of my friends here because we call today sisters and brothers this is a true family and well I passed the test of being admitted to MIT and it was a wonderful experience I was a research assistant for Simo and worked with students from Harvard and we worked in translating logo in Swahili in Urdu and we were also experimenting logo in local languages and today I am a regional education advisor to provide a technical advice to project education project in Africa in West and Central Africa using Simo's paradigm I will elaborate more later I have so much to say so much to say I am David Cavallo I am currently a visiting professor at a new public university University of Brazil which as its basic plan purely active project based learning interdisciplinary every student gets a laptop everybody learns programming we have robotics we would have had our fab set up if our budget hadn't been cut but we hope it will be restored this week but you notice that the ideas of learning and the role of technology and the idea of bringing these things to areas and regions and populations that never had access before is coming to fruition and so it's really fantastic to participate in but then also you see how ideas flow and not necessarily through institutions but certainly through people if they've had a strong enough experience and so the launching question of how is Simo influence my thinking I think the only way I can answer that as really influenced by Simo is that such a question is unanswerable correctly or fully or honestly because for Simo had such an integrity of ideas that they always had to keep their power and they had to go in their full depth and the problem with education is often we just tell you about a powerful idea and you never get to learn it and so these kind of things and creating the environments and conditions and the tools to work with such that you can explore and go deeply into these ideas Edith Ackerman who we all dearly miss used to always say that Simo would never mix the water with the wine and that was always about the ideas it's just such a mathematician or whatever that it had to be correct and whether it was for career or for this or for that didn't matter the idea had to stay pure and this is I think this push for knowing deeply and having the time to do so and Simo would always say don't save time lose it and so these kind of things to not have the three minute experiences or the hour of code or anything like that and create the environment where everybody can learn that's I'd like to pick up on that you know when we had this is for everyone when we had our conversation before on the phone there was some discussion about whether it was Simo's ideas independently or Simo's ideas coupled with a certain kind of personality and when we talked briefly about his personality people came up with certain qualities that he was radically inclusive was one term that people came up with and that he we heard earlier today that he was deeply committed to the intellectual empowerment of other people no matter where they were or what conditions they were under so I'm wondering if you would like to speak to that just going in a little more deeply into your experience what was it about Simo combination of ideas and personality and his generosity which you've also heard a lot which really made the kind of experimentation and risk that you were talking about possible well I think that one of the characteristics about Simo was that even though he was a fantastic thinker and intellectual he defined himself as an activist and he really wanted to leave an imprint in the world and in children's lives in the case of the Costa Rica project it was a project of great magnitude we have in a country with a population of around 4 million people over 2 million children and youth have gone to the program which has existed for 30 years we have survived 7 government changes and we have been able to institutionalize a program that is today not only extremely successful but that it has been able to influence national policy since the ideas about a new culture of learning the ideas about project based learning the ideas about computational thinking have gone into national policy not only into the experience of the teachers this is a project that is centered in the student but also in teacher development at the time when it began nobody wanted to get teachers involved with computers they thought they didn't have the capacity and they wanted to bypass the experience of working with the teachers I remember the minister of finance from a American country who told me I love your project this is a fantastic project because you just install computers get the teachers out of the way and then reduce the number of well gas of strikes and you have just the best situation ever because you can actually get the education without the teachers and this is the dream of a financial minister but certainly not the dream of someone interested in education and Seymour was very sensitive to the way that we designed the projects and very particularly to the way in which we did student development teacher development and in which our program had an impact not only in the educational system but very specifically in the country's economy over one or two decades Costa Rica went from being a basically agricultural country exporting coffee and bananas to being a technology exporter one of the first exporters in the world if you calculate that according to the country's population and GDP so the impact that this program and the work with Seymour and the media lab had really changed our economy and we have research today that proves the impact in cognitive and learning outcomes of the students that we can now with great joy share thank you so much. Other comments about this? Thank you Yes, I will just talk about my own case Yeah, please because I was in this media lab I was one of the first graduates from this media lab and working with Seymour I introduced logo into my home with my own children and from the age of six they started programming in logo and this boosted the way of doing research way of learning, way of engaging themselves into learning and today to my two children they are all doctors today one is a PhD in electrical engineering and the other is a medical doctor and they still remember how logo helped them move forward and because I wanted this experience to I wanted to offer to share this experience with other children in Senegal we've created an association that became an NGO today just to have a creative environment with computers and the like so that Senegalese children Senegalese women because for me it's very important to have an educated woman, an educated mother if you want the community to move forward with children's education and that was so important for me so such a powerful idea I lived with and when I see what I got from my children I just want all every woman to be highly educated to understand the power of thinking the power of sharing and the power of doing things with passion so this changed a lot so incredibly we only have 10 minutes left so do you have anything you'd like to add or can I move on to it yes Stephanie I would like to echo what Clotilde said thinking also has to go through the action and I think the lesson that we all learned from Simo is that if you want to really make a difference in your own growth and the community that you are working with you really have to embed it in a project that can be pregnant of very many important aspects that really includes everybody and gives everyone a chance to express their ideas and see them happen and so that sometimes when you work at level of a country and you want to see the change the task can be daunting but when we worked with Simo his idea was that if we understood how to translate our important messages in projects that can be an image to the world of what is possible showing what is possible is the way of engaging larger communities and actually showing people who have the tough decision of taking a change into a system because everybody is afraid of it and the risk averse to actually have an example to think with so that you could make things move forward David so Nicholas mentioned Simo growing up in South Africa being in England, France, Switzerland but I think more so for Simo and this is very Piagetian in Simo every child is unique and every child you had to understand how is this one thinking what are you doing and Carol Spurry would say building that relationship with them and that's where the deepest learning would happen and so I think of the things you realize is that sometimes you realize why are you working outside the U.S. or why not here we would do things because often overseas you would have more of a chance to do something truly innovative because again with Simo it was fixed with ideas where can we keep moving the ideas learning forward in the best way so the respect I give respect to every child everywhere and still think about what's universal in learning what you can get done so I want to make a quick comment I was originally a panelist but I was asked to comment on one particular thing first of all I would like to suggest to MIT that we obviously have such a rich and incredible set of ideas that someone should really compile the impact Simor has had globally Alexei Semyonov from the Moscow Open Institute for Open Education came up to me and was talking about the incredible impact in Russia and if we had more time I would have invited him to join us but I want to talk briefly about Simor as an activist that was the point that came up so when I first got to know Simor I was writing a very long book on the history of apartheid movement and relations between US and South Africa and this is my mother's husband he's a nice guy from South Africa but I started asking him questions and I discovered that he had an immense repository of knowledge and I also learned that when I asked him a question I had to be prepared for a very precise lengthy answer so if I just said hey what's the difference between the ANC and something else I got this very deeply thoughtful answer but I went and interviewed a cousin of his named Jennifer Davis who is from the American Committee on Africa one of the leading anti-apartheid groups and I mentioned that I knew Simor and she got very quiet and I said do you know anything about Simor? and she said however brilliant Simor may be as a mathematician his courage and his brilliance as a political scientist in our darkest hour far exceeds that so I went back have dinner with this guy looking at him through a new lens and I think it's something he didn't talk about very often but this is a man who came out of South Africa under very difficult conditions where he stood out and was in grave danger of being suppressed at any moment and he so I want to build on that just a little bit we are in a unique moment in American history right now where many of our core values are being attacked across all categories including education where the fundamental values of the republic are in jeopardy and I can't, I think Simor would be surprised that we haven't had more discussion of our civic obligations that flow out of what he has learned and what he taught and so I want to raise that because we're wrapping up today Simor cared passionately about democracy he cared passionately about human rights we had hours and hour long conversations and I think he would want us to reflect not just on all the things we talked about but what are those implications given that some of our core values and maybe even our functioning democracy may be destroyed he would want us to reflect on that so without we only have a short amount of time but what is your reflection on Simor today as an activist taking everything that he stood for how would he be moving forward today I'm reminded of the time Nicholas introduced Simor something here and said Simor when was the last time you were in jail so through him he gave an answer that was so many years was older than he was but it was fundamental but I think you can't think about Simor you can't pull one thing away from another it's integrated so always the idea of in terms of social justice is always deeply there but it wasn't separated from anything else we would do and there was always this motivation for these things but where I was reading something recent that Simor wrote and where he talked about people believing conspiracy theories and after with all this violence and with terrorism why is it important still to study math and he was talking about the type of thinking that's developed and the probabilities are there so if you couldn't believe in these conspiracy theories if you had any sense of probabilities in a real way and so there in this case what you're saying is that he deeply believed in the role of developing critical thinking and where with computation and with mathematics every speaker's been talking about the real world puts his back on your project but it's more not that you're going to become this kind of engineer or that kind of machine but you are going to be able to think deeply through all the way through a deep hard complex problem and be able to come up with a functioning answer or a functioning solution and so the part about social justice is absolutely always been all the way through our work and deeply essential but it was never disconnected from the importance of learning and especially in our case because he would say lots of people have great ideas about other things but what we think best about is how we use computation for learning yes I think one of the key elements and it was mentioned in the previous panel is the idea and the reality of empowering children to be independent thinkers and to stand for what they believe and to act in the world through the things they create to the things they share in the ways in which they collaborate and I want to quote something that a child from the Atlantic coast in Costa Rica the Limón area which is a banana producing area and from a very very poor neighborhood and family said when somebody asked him what is it like to program and he said when I program the computer I feel like I am driving a car and I think that's a fantastic metaphor because driving a car means not only being in connection with a technological object but it means being in control and going somewhere I don't think it was an accident that when we inaugurated the Costa Rican project in January of 1988 many years ago that the title of the newspaper of the article in the newspaper in the first page of La Nación said in good hands children were learning to connect with computers in a culture oriented to transform their lives and to transform society to be better citizens and to be more joyful people in good hands and those were the good hands of Simo and of the team and the community of spirits that he created through the media lab and in connection with all of these international projects so we have one minute left very quickly I would like I remembered something that happened when you asked this question a journalist once asked Simo with all the knowledge that you have if there was one thing one single thing you would want to make sure that children learned what would that be and Simo paused for a while and he said I would like them to learn how to exercise a vision and I thought that was incredibly powerful because whatever situation you are in that you don't like if you exercise that vision and you work hard enough at it and you find like-minded people there's nothing to stop you what a wonderful ending please join me in thanking thank you thank you for your extraordinary leadership good luck with your projects and I know we all want to hear more so we will hang around for the reception be part of that thank you thinking is good for thinking whether we are a 5 year old or a sophisticated scientist what we really have to think about is what produces involvement, engagement what grabs the individual it's much more related to love than to logic in 1984 there was a television program in the Danish television called talking turtle and I happened to watch that and there was this charismatic person there talking about what children could do with computers I was simply so fascinated by that that guy was Seymour Papert what interested me was Seymour Papert view on children and how they can learn through experimentation how they can learn through play education is very little to do with explanation it has to do with engagement, with falling in love with the material I remember the first meeting we had was in a hotel in Boston it was not there at that point in time and Seymour was there, Ms. Resnick was there and Brian Silverman was also there and they demonstrated the logo language and then the physical turtle was fascinating to think of the spirit of logo is to produce a language that encourages an attitude of taking it and changing it shaping it to yourself the essential point about the turtle is its role as a transitional object that is a transitional between the body, the self and abstract mathematical ideas so we thought the turtle that could as easily have been a model that you had created with Lego bricks the children are learning to program they are learning about motion above all they are learning the scientific knowledge is not something separate from their passion for toys by the time Papert was two he was already fascinated by rotating things wheels, gears, pulleys for him gears and wheels had become objects to think with he had no idea that he was preparing himself to become a mathematician but he was one happy moment for me was in 89 when we actually could name Seymour Papert Lego professor of learning research I gave Seymour a chair we built a Lego chair a very nice Lego chair for him playful learning that takes place in the building of such a chair is horrible Seymour at a point in time started talking about the intelligent brick the idea of actually building behavior into your model that was sort of the fascination that we shared the total learning environment in which the child grows up includes school of course the most important parts are in relationship, in play in social forms in art in sensibility to aesthetics all this is part of the developing individual and the computer enters into all of that when we think of how fast the world is changing lifelong learning is really important and it's very very important that thereby we say that children are our own models because they do it all the time when the elevator comes up and hits that little button it'll reverse the direction stop now, get it now nobody really knows what the future will be like but we know that these new technologies these computers will be an important part of it our goal has to make it sufficiently part of the culture of the place that everybody uses it when it's needed Seymour is a fascinating person and there's of course a lot of wisdom in him and especially this about how important it is that children learn through experimentation or as he called it constructionism is a very strong concept that I fully endorse the fact that we share these values that has kept us together for all these years instead of being policemen obliged to force children to learn stuff that they don't want to know can be in the more enviable position of being the source of knowledge and of help for children who need that knowledge in order to do something that comes from their heart so it's really wonderful to have Kel, Kurt Christensen here I know Kel, you and Seymour had such a long productive, creative and special relationship maybe you can just share a little bit about what is it that made it such a special relationship well it was a very special relationship because when I saw that talking turtle program in the Danish television I was fascinated and thought that this person we have to work with and Seymour's wonderful and powerful ideas of children's learning to play and experimentation and that really resonates so well with all the work that we do in the LEGO group and our mission is really to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow and personally I must say every time I met with Seymour there was always he's eager getting all the ideas out and then discuss and there was so much energy and I always enjoyed it tremendously he loved playing with ideas, he loved playing with children and toys I remember many meetings in your office where both Seymour and you were both always tinkering and experimenting so I know in particular Seymour worked with you on thinking about the role of computers and new technologies within the LEGO activities maybe you can say a little bit about the way your interactions on that personally I have always been loving programming I started with programming basic in the early 70s so seeing here the local language was created for children to go to but on the other hand you could make very complex things out of it that reminded me also about that there is this similarity between building with LEGO bricks and programming I think that programming children set themselves a task and they know that it can be done they try out different things if it works it's fine, if it doesn't they just try another thing the same when they set themselves a task when they built with LEGO bricks and they know it can be done and there are always endless possibilities I know the ideas really flowed in both directions so Seymour contributed to the ways technologies got used at LEGO but the ideas from you and the LEGO companies certainly influenced the ideas here I think we did have a fantastic cooperation with Seymour, with you Mitch and all good colleagues here at the media lab over the years and they also one thing more about the turtle also because when I saw that program of course I thought that turtle could as easily, I think that was also in the video by the way, could have been done with LEGO bricks and that was also where it all started in our collaboration I think it was in 88 or 89 we could launch the first interface so that children could plug motors and they could make cars and windmills using the logo language and I think that was fantastic as the first step and Seymour of course also had the idea of the intelligent brick as I said here and we worked very hard together on that also there were many different versions of the programmable brick until finally in 1998 we could launch the LEGO Mindstorms products and we were very happy of course to be able to call the Mindstorms because that was of course the Seymour's fantastic book and the Mindstorms is really a very successful product because it allows children to build behavior into their creations, their robots or the creatures or whatever and so that was for us a very very important next step in our development and Seymour was really honored when he became the LEGO professor as we saw in the video and when Seymour retired and I know that Professorship was renamed the LEGO Third Professorship in Seymour's honor and I've been really honored to hold that chair and have tried to live up to Seymour's visions in our work together but I know you would like to continue to explore more ways to be able to continue to support Seymour's vision and Seymour's ideas Just as we today have talked so much about all Seymour's fantastic powerful ideas and what he has meant to us personally and to mankind I think that it's very important that we continue also to inspire young people to continue working with his ideas and all that he did so therefore we have decided in the LEGO foundation to endow three LEGO Papart fellowships that will then allow some of your graduate students really to study and research in the intersection between play, learning and creativity and we're really so grateful because it will allow us each year to choose three of the graduate students and I know also the idea came up to choose them from three different continents to make sure we have diversity of people who will be doing things we'll choose students who are following in Seymour's tradition and extending and working on Seymour's ideas so we're really excited about the opportunity and really appreciate the opportunity to do that. We really appreciate in this way also to be able to do more in the future with the cooperation fantastic cooperation we have had with Media Lab and all what Seymour stands for. We'll do everything we can to keep alive Seymour's powerful ideas and his playful spirit. Thank you. I think it's best as we come to the closer today to let Seymour have the last word so let me just finish by first thanking Keldman Lego Company again with the new Lego Popper Fellowship and we'll allow Seymour to have the last word. If we project any sort of democratic world we have to assume that education and learning to think differently and that is learning to learn how to think is going to be an essential contribution maybe the essential contribution to that. I feel very deeply committed to the idea that although rationality isn't everything and passion and interests and faith of various sorts count as much nevertheless rationality is a force for the good and the more people are capable of thinking the better the world will be the more they have access to knowledge about the rest of the world the better the world will be.