{"id":3149,"date":"2013-11-13T08:39:33","date_gmt":"2013-11-13T13:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stager.tv\/?p=3149"},"modified":"2013-11-13T08:39:33","modified_gmt":"2013-11-13T13:39:33","slug":"a-love-letter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stager.tv\/?p=3149","title":{"rendered":"A Love Letter"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Papert circa 1999 enjoying the work of a middle schooler<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about my friend, colleague, and mentor Dr. Seymour Papert<\/a> a lot lately. Our new book, \u201cInvent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom<\/a>,\u201d is dedicated to him and we tried our best to give him the credit he deserves for predicting, inventing, or laying the foundation for much of what we now celebrate as \u201cthe maker movement.\u201d The popularity of the book and my non-stop travel schedule to bring the ideas of constructionism to classrooms all over the world is testament to Seymour\u2019s vision and evidence that it took much of the world decades to catch up.<\/p>\n

Jazz and Logo are two of my favorite things in life. They both make me feel bigger than myself and nurture me. Jazz and Logo provide epistemological lenses through which I view the world and appreciate the highest potential of mankind. Like jazz, Logo has been pronounced dead since its inception, but I KNOW how good it is for kids. I KNOW how it makes them feel intelligent and creative. I KNOW that Logo-like activities hold the potential to change the course of schooling. That\u2019s why I have been teaching it to children and their teachers in one form or another for almost 32 years.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been teaching a lot of Logo lately, particularly a relatively new version called Turtle Art<\/a>. Turtle Art<\/a> is a real throwback to the days of one turtle focused on turtle geometry, but the interface has been simplified to allow block-based programming and the images resulting from mathematical ideas can be quite beautiful works of art. (you can see some examples in the image gallery at Turtleart.org<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Turtle Art<\/a> was created by Brian Silverman, Artemis Papert (Seymour\u2019s daughter) and their friend Paula Bonta. Turtle Art itself is a work of art that allows learners of all ages to begin programming, creating, solving problems, and engaging in hard fun within seconds of seeing it for the first time. Since an MIT undergraduate in the late 1970s, Brian Silverman has made Papert\u2019s ideas live in products that often exceeded Papert\u2019s expectations.<\/p>\n

There aren\u2019t many software environments or activities of any sort that engage 3rd graders, 6th graders, 10th graders and adults equally as Turtle Art<\/a>. I wrote another blog post a year or so ago about how I wish I had video of the first time I introduced Turtle Art to a class of 3rd graders. Their \u201cmath class\u201d looked like a rugby scrum, there was moving, and wiggling, and pointing, and sharing and hugging and high-fiving everywhere while the kids were BEING mathematicians.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, I taught a sixth grade class in Mumbai to use\u00a0Turtle Art<\/a> for the first time. They worked for 90-minutes straight. Any casual observer could see the kids wriggle their bodies to determine the right orientation of the turtle, assist their peers, show-off their creations, and occasionally shriek with delight in a reflexive fashion when the result of their program surprised them or confirmed their hypothesis. As usual, a wide range of mathematical ability and learning styles were on display. Some kids get lost in one idea and tune out the entire world. This behavior is not just reserved to the loner or A student. It is often the kid you least expect.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, while the rest of the class was creating and then modifying elaborate\u00a0Turtle Art<\/a> programs I provided, one sixth grader went \u201coff the grid\u201d to program the turtle to draw a house. The house has a long and checkered past in Logo history. In the early days of Turtle Graphics, lots of kids put triangles on top of squares to draw a house. Papert used the example in his seminal book, \u201cMindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas,<\/a>\u201d and was then horrified to discover that \u201cmaking houses\u201d had become de-facto curriculum in classrooms the world over. From then on, Papert refrained from sharing screen shots to avoid others concluding that they were scripture.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It sure was nice to see a kid make a house spontaneously, just like two generations of kids have done with the turtle. It reminded me of what the great jazz saxophonist and composer Jimmy Heath said at Constructing Modern Knowledge<\/a> last summer, \u201cWhat was good IS<\/em> good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Love is all you need<\/strong>
\nThis morning, I taught sixty 10th graders for three hours. We spend the first 75 minutes or so programming in\u00a0Turtle Art<\/a>.\u00a0 Like the 6th graders, the 10th graders\u00a0 had never seen\u00a0Turtle Art<\/a> before. After\u00a0Turtle Art<\/a>,\u00a0 the kids could choose between experimenting with MaKey MaKeys<\/a>, wearable computing, or Arduino programming. Seymour would have been delighted by the hard fun and engineering on display. I was trying to cram as many different experiences into a short period of time as possible so that the school\u2019s teachers would have options to consider long after I leave.<\/p>\n

After we divided into three work areas, something happened that Papert would have LOVED. He would have given speeches about this experience, written papers about it and chatted enthusiastically about it for months. Ninety minutes or so after everyone else had moved on to work with other materials, one young lady sat quietly by herself and continued programming in Turtle Art<\/a>. She created many subprocedures in order to generate the image below.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nPapert loved love and would have loved this expression of love created by \u201chis turtle.\u201d (Papert also loved wordplay and using terms like, “learning learning.” I\u2019m sure he would be pleased with how many times I managed to use love in one sentence.) His life\u2019s work was towards the creation of a Mathland<\/a> where one could fall in love with mathematical thinking and become fluent in the same way a child born in France becomes fluent in French. Papert spoke often of creating a mathematics that children can love rather than wasting our energy teaching a math they hate. Papert was fond of saying, \u201cLove is a better master than duty,\u201d and delighted in having once submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation with that title (it was rejected).<\/p>\n

The fifteen or sixteen year old girl programming in\u00a0Turtle Art<\/a> for the first time could not possibly have been more intimately involved in the creation of her mathematical artifact. Her head, heart, body and soul were connected to her project.<\/p>\n

The experience resonated with her and will stay with me forever. I sure wish my friend Seymour could have seen it.<\/p>\n

Love,<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Turtle Art<\/a> is free for friends who ask for a copy, but is not open source. It\u2019s educational efficacy is the result of a singular design vision unencumbered by a community adding features to the environment. Email contact@turtleart.org<\/a> to request a copy for Mac, Windows or Linux.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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