“As children construct things in the world, they construct new ideas and theories in their minds, which motivates them to construct new things in the world, and on and on.”
Mindstorms
From the book
Piaget has demonstrated that children learn fundamental mathematical ideas by first building their own, very much different (for example, preconservationist) mathematics. And children learn language by first learning their own (“baby-talk”) dialects. So, when we think of microworlds as incubators for powerful ideas, we are trying to draw upon this effective strategy: We allow learners to learn the “official” physics by allowing them the freedom to invent many that will work in as many invented worlds.
Why there is no good answer to “how do I learn CS”: “I see Piaget as the theorist of learning without curriculum and the theorist of the kind of learning that happens without deliberate teaching… But ‘teaching without curriculum’ does not mean spontaneous, free-form classrooms or simply ‘leaving the child alone.’ It means supporting children as they build their own intellectual structures with materials drawn from the surrounding culture"
"They’ll handle the details. Indeed, they insist on it. For a project to feel like your own, you must have sufficient autonomy. You can’t be working to order, or slowed down by bureaucracy.” — Paul Graham
Design Justice
From the book
Papert rejected the banking method of education: educator transmits a piece of information to the learner’s brain
Instead, learning is experiential: it takes place through an active process where the learning develops the ability to modify or transform an object or idea.
Core principles
- People do not get ideas, they make them
- People construct new knowledge with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful products
”Instead, design justice pedagogies must support students to actively develop their own critical analysis of design, power, and liberation, in ways that connect with their own lived experience”
However, if resource constraints become an excuse to avoid examining the root of the problem area, then designers will almost always end up, at best, providing Band-Aids for deep wounds and, at word, actively serving existing power structures.