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Papert’s programming language, LOGO, was developed as a means of providing children with “objects to think with.” Whereas Piaget’s constructivism tended to downplay the formative importance of cultural building blocks on learning, Papert’s “constructionism” places a high value on the pedagogical role of media. This is the substance of Papert’s major contribution to our thinking about how to support children’s learning.

Papert’s use of “constructionism” signals a significant shift from constructivism to include an emphasis on the social and interactive context, or the situatedness, of building valued artifacts within a bounded setting, or a “microworld”. As Papert wrote,

Constructionism—the N word as opposed to the V word—shares constructivism’s
connotation of learning as “building knowledge structures” irrespective of the
circumstances of the learning. It then adds the idea that this happens especially
felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a
public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.
(Papert 1991, p. 1)

Papert emphasizes the multiple ways in which the representation of knowledge in a computer program like LOGO, and its explicit manipulability, render concrete, and therefore accessible, the formal and abstract characteristics of mathematical knowledge, specifically, as well as metacognitive knowledge, more generally.

In the excerpt from Mindstorms that we have read, it is clear that Papert is making an impassioned and cogent argument for an approach to designing educational technologies that is qualitatively distinct from the conventional applications of that historical period – computer-based programmed instruction with a clear and linear lock-step curriculum. In Papert’s microworlds, learners are making things using tools that make abstractions concrete and manipulable. He emphasizes several aspects of the design of microworlds, including:

• Activity that focuses on concrete instantiations of abstract concepts
• Intelligent manipulation of objects
• Talking about thinking in the process of solving problems
• Reflections on thinking in the process of solving problems
• Failure as a normal and intelligent part of problem-solving, that leads to refinement of ideas
• Opportunities to represent ideas in a public forum where they can be explicitly testedPapert’s discussion about how educational institutions take up particular technologies is both insightful, and prophetic.

Papert’s discussion of how computers are typically used in supporting novice writers aptly identifies the problem at-hand, which is that educational uses of media tend to reproduce non-educational relations to tasks that are rich in potential for learning and intellectual growth. And so, for example, immature writers may use computers for writing, but “the computer is seen as a teaching instrument” where teaching writing is reduced to producing superficially correct text.