Sublime

I began to see how children who had learned to program computers could use very concrete computer models to think about thinking and to learn about learning and, in doing so, enhance their powers as psychologists and as epistemologists.

Thus this book is really about how a culture, a way of thinking, an idea comes to inhabit a young mind.

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

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

This book is about how computers can be carriers of powerful ideas and of the seeds of cultural change, how they can help people form new relationships with knowledge that cuts across the traditional lines separating humanities from sciences and knowledge of the self from both of these. It is about using computers to challenge current beliefs about

Two fundamental ideas run through this book. The first is that it is possible to design computers so that learning to communicate with them can be a natural process, more like learning French by living in France than like trying to learn it through the unnatural process of American foreign-language instruction in classrooms. Second, learning to com

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

The difference between what he “could” and “could not” learn did not depend on the content of the knowledge but on his relationship to it.