## Highlights For Seymour, <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">computers were not a replacement for the teacher but a new medium that children could use for making things and expressing themselves</mark>. — location: 87 ^ref-56289 --- Seymour rejected the computer-aided instruction approach in which “the computer is being used to program the child” and argued for an alternative approach in which “the child programs the computer.” — location: 89 ^ref-6298 --- Seymour would view most of the current initiatives as “technocentric” (a term that Seymour popularized). That is, the initiatives focus too much on helping children develop technical skills: how to use a 3d printer, how to define an algorithm, how to write efficient computer code. For Seymour, technical skills were never the goal. In the Introduction to Mindstorms, he wrote: “My central focus is not on the machine but on the mind.” Seymour was certainly interested in machines and new technologies, but only insofar as they could support learning or lead to new insights about learning. — location: 95 ^ref-4520 --- Piaget’s great insight was that knowledge is not delivered from teacher to learner; rather, children are constantly constructing knowledge through their everyday interactions with people and objects around them. Seymour’s constructionism theory adds a second type of construction, arguing that children construct knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world. — location: 103 ^ref-36102 --- Seymour would be very frustrated with the approach of today’s ai-in-education efforts. Seymour was interested in applying ideas from ai to engage children in thinking about their own thinking—and learning about their own learning. <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">Most of today’s ai-in-education initiatives have a very different set of goals, focusing on the use of machine intelligence, rather than the understanding of human intelligence.</mark> — location: 130 ^ref-35347 --- 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. — location: 147 ^ref-48070 --- Seymour once said: “Education has very little to do with explanation, it has to do with engagement, with falling in love with the material.” — location: 156 ^ref-17062 --- Seymour wrote about the Brazilian samba schools, where people come together to create music and dance routines for the annual carnival festival. What intrigued Seymour most was the way that samba schools bring together people of all different ages and all different levels of experience: children and adults, novices and experts, all working together, learning with and from one another. — location: 158 ^ref-18935 --- Often, people associate play with laughter and fun. But for Seymour, play meant more than that. It involved experimenting, taking risks, testing the boundaries, and iteratively adapting when things go wrong. Seymour sometimes referred to this process as “hard fun.” He recognized that children don’t want things to be easy: — location: 165 ^ref-15016 --- 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. — location: 213 ^ref-26023 --- I find myself frequently reminded of several aspects of my encounter with the differential gear. First, I remember that no one told me to learn about differential gears. Second, I remember that there was feeling, love, as well as understanding in my relationship with gears. Third, I remember that my first encounter with them was in my second year. If any “scientific” educational psychologist had tried to “measure” the effects of this encounter, he would probably have failed. — location: 221 ^ref-56495 --- I fell in love with the gears. This is something that cannot be reduced to purely “cognitive” terms. Something very personal happened, and one cannot assume that it would be repeated for other children in exactly the same form. — location: 232 ^ref-47820 --- The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate. Because it can take on a thousand forms and can serve a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes. This book is the result of my own attempts over the past decade to turn computers into instruments flexible enough so that many children can each create for themselves something like what the gears were for me. — location: 235 ^ref-61825 --- In my vision, space-age objects, in the form of small computers, will cross these cultural barriers to enter the private worlds of children everywhere. They will do so not as mere physical objects. <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">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</mark>. — location: 266 ^ref-60761 --- One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building. — location: 282 ^ref-44496 --- I take from Jean Piaget a model of children as builders of their own intellectual structures. Children seem to be innately gifted learners, acquiring long before they go to school a vast quantity of knowledge by a process I call “Piagetian learning,” or “learning without being taught.” — location: 309 ^ref-13139 --- But in many cases where Piaget would explain the slower development of a particular concept by its greater complexity or formality, I see the critical factor as the relative poverty of the culture in those materials that would make the concept simple and concrete. — location: 318 ^ref-36207 --- For people in the teaching professions, the word “education” tends to evoke “teaching,” particularly classroom teaching. The goal of education research tends therefore to be focused on how to improve classroom teaching. But if, as I have stressed here, the model of successful learning is the way a child learns to talk, a process that takes place without deliberate and organized teaching, the goal set is very different. — location: 335 ^ref-19412 --- I think that the best way to understand learning is first to understand specific, well-chosen cases and then to worry afterward about how to generalize from this understanding. — location: 363 ^ref-57039 --- Several qualities contributed to their effectiveness. First, they were part of my natural “landscape,” embedded in the culture around me. This made it possible for me to find them myself and relate to them in my own fashion. Second, gears were part of the world of adults around me, and through them I could relate to these people. Third, I could use my body to think about the gears. I could feel how gears turn by imagining by body turning. This made it possible for me to draw on my “body knowledge” to think about gear systems. And finally, because, in a very real sense, the relationship between gears contains a great deal of mathematical information, I could use the gears to think about formal systems. — location: 374 ^ref-13537 --- My goal has been the design of other objects that children can make theirs for themselves and in their own ways. Much of this book will describe my path through this kind of research. — location: 380 ^ref-4297 --- First, that all children will, under the right conditions, acquire a proficiency with programming that will make it one of their more advanced intellectual accomplishments. Second, that the “right conditions” are very different from the kind of access to computers that is now becoming established as the norm in schools. — location: 438 ^ref-29300 --- IN MOST CONTEMPORARY EDUCATIONAL SITUATIONS WHERE CHILDREN come into contact with computers, the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child. In the LOGO environment the relationship is reversed. The child, even at preschool ages, is in control: The child programs the computer. And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves think. — location: 477 ^ref-33585 --- this book is an argument that in many important cases this developmental difference can be attributed to our culture’s relative poverty in materials from which the apparently “more advanced” intellectual structures can be built. — location: 493 ^ref-53010 --- Piaget distinguishes between “concrete” thinking and “formal” thinking. — location: 507 ^ref-19919 --- two kinds of thinking Piaget associates with the formal stage of intellectual development: combinatorial thinking, where one has to reason in terms of the set of all possible states of a system, and self-referential thinking about thinking itself. — location: 518 ^ref-25108 --- In a typical experiment in combinatorial thinking, children are asked to form all the possible combinations (or “families”) of beads of assorted colors. It really is quite remarkable that most children are unable to do this systematically and accurately until they are in the fifth or sixth grades. — location: 520 ^ref-18553 --- our culture is relatively poor in models of systematic procedures. Until recently there was not even a name in popular language for programming, let alone for the ideas needed to do so successfully. There is no word for “nested loops” and no word for the double-counting bug. Indeed, there are no words for the powerful ideas computerists refer to as “bug” and “debugging.” — location: 532 ^ref-15947 --- Without the incentive or the materials to build powerful, concrete ways to think about problems involving systematicity, children are forced to approach such problems in a groping, abstract fashion. — location: 535 ^ref-49558 --- For example, many children are held back in their learning because they have a model of learning in which you have either “got it” or “got it wrong.” But when you learn to program a computer, you almost never get it right the first time. Learning to be a master programmer is learning to become highly skilled at isolating and correcting “bugs,” the parts that keep the program from working. The question to ask about the program is not whether it is right or wrong, but if it is fixable. If this way of looking at intellectual products were generalized to how the larger culture thinks about knowledge and its acquisition, we all might be less intimidated by our fears of “being wrong.” This potential influence of the computer on changing our notion of a black and white version of our successes and failures is an example of using the computer as an “object-to-think-with.” — location: 544 ^ref-44360 --- Of course the Turtle can help in the teaching of traditional curriculum, but I have thought of it as a vehicle for Piagetian learning, which to me is learning without curriculum. There are those who think about creating a “Piagetian curriculum” or “Piagetian teaching methods.” But to my mind these phrases and the activities they represent are contradictions in terms. I see Piaget as the theorist of learning without curriculum and the theorist of the kind of learning that happens without deliberate teaching. To turn him into the theorist of a new curriculum is to stand him on his head. — location: 684 ^ref-47591 --- 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. In this model, educational intervention means changing the culture, planting new constructive elements in it, and eliminating noxious ones. — location: 689 ^ref-39116 --- making good choices is not always easy, in part because past choices can often haunt us. There is a tendency for the first usable, but still primitive, product of a new technology to dig itself in. I have called this phenomenon the QWERTY phenomenon. — location: 704 ^ref-17255 --- in the preschool years every child first constructs one or more preadult theorizations of the world and then moves toward more adultlike views. And all this is done through what I have called Piagetian learning, a learning process that has many features the schools should envy: It is effective (all the children get there), it is inexpensive (it seems to require neither teacher nor curriculum development), and it is humane (the children seem to do it in a carefree spirit without explicit external rewards and punishments). — location: 861 ^ref-19788 --- Our children grow up in a culture permeated with the idea that there are “smart people” and “dumb people.” The social construction of the individual is as a bundle of aptitudes. There are people who are “good at math” and people who “can’t do math.” Everything is set up for children to attribute their first unsuccessful or unpleasant learning experiences to their own disabilities. As a result, children perceive failure as relegating them either to the group of “dumb people” or, more often, to a group of people “dumb at x” (where, as we have pointed out, x often equals mathematics). — location: 879 ^ref-20281 --- Imagine that children were forced to spend an hour a day drawing dance steps on squared paper and had to pass tests in these “dance facts” before they were allowed to dance physically. Would we not expect the world to be full of “dancophobes”? Would we say that those who made it to the dance floor and music had the greatest “aptitude for dance”? In my view, it is no more appropriate to draw conclusions about mathematical aptitude from children’s unwillingness to spend many hundreds of hours doing sums. — location: 893 ^ref-62943 --- I am convinced that what shows up as intellectual weakness very often grows, as Jim’s did, out of intellectual strengths. And it is not only verbal strengths that undermine others. Every careful observer of children must have seen similar processes working in different directions: For example, a child who has become enamored of logical order is set up to be turned off by English spelling and to go on from there to develop a global dislike for writing. — location: 924 ^ref-31338 --- Well into a year long study that put powerful computers in the classrooms of a group of “average” seventh graders, the students were at work on what they called “computer poetry.” They were using computer programs to generate sentences. They gave the computer a syntactic structure within which to make random choices from given lists of words. The result is the kind of concrete poetry we see in the illustration that follows. One of the students, a thirteen-year-old named Jenny, had deeply touched the project’s staff by asking on the first day of her computer work, “Why were we chosen for this? We’re not the brains.” The study had deliberately chosen children of “average” school performance. One day Jenny came in very excited. She had made a discovery. “Now I know why we have nouns and verbs,” she said. For many years in school Jenny had been drilled in grammatical categories. She had never understood the differences between nouns and verbs and adverbs. But now it was apparent that her difficulty with grammar was not due to an inability to work with logical categories. It was something else. She had simply seen no purpose in the enterprise. She had not been able to make any sense of what grammar was about in the sense of what it might be for. — location: 975 ^ref-21110 --- Before electronic calculators existed, it was a practical social necessity that many people be “programmed” to perform such operations as long division quickly and accurately. But now that we can purchase calculators cheaply we should reconsider the need to expend several hundred hours of every child’s life on learning such arithmetic functions. — location: 1030 ^ref-49475 --- The activity known as “sums” performs this feedback function in school math. These absurd little repetitive exercises have only one merit: They are easy to grade. But this merit has bought them a firm place at the center of school math. In brief, I maintain that construction of school math is strongly influenced by what seemed to be teachable when math was taught as a “dead” subject, using the primitive, passive technologies of sticks and sand, chalk and blackboard, pencil and paper. The result was an intellectually incoherent set of topics that violates the most elementary mathetic principles of what makes certain material easy to learn and some almost impossible. — location: 1049 ^ref-21500 --- As my colleagues and I have worked through these ideas, a number of principles have given more structure to the concept of an appropriable mathematics. First, there was the continuity principle: The mathematics must be continuous with well-established personal knowledge from which it can inherit a sense of warmth and value as well as “cognitive” competence. Then there was the power principle: It must empower the learner to perform personally meaningful projects that could not be done without it. Finally there was a principle of cultural resonance: The topic must make sense in terms of a larger social context. I have spoken of Turtle geometry making sense to children. But it will not truly make sense to children unless it is accepted by adults too. — location: 1071 ^ref-51965 --- the Turtle circle is body syntonic in that the circle is firmly related to children’s sense and knowledge about their own bodies. Or it is ego syntonic in that it is coherent with children’s sense of themselves as people with intentions, goals, desires, likes, and dislikes. A child who draws a Turtle circle wants to draw the circle; doing it produces pride and excitement. Turtle geometry is learnable because it is syntonic. — location: 1221 ^ref-49247 --- For example, Polya recommends that whenever we approach a problem we should run through a mental checklist of heuristic questions such as: Can this problem be subdivided into simpler problems? Can this problem be related to a problem I already know how to solve? Turtle geometry lends itself to this exercise. — location: 1228 ^ref-30949 --- School math, though elementary in terms of its arithmetic content, is a relatively advanced subject for the exercise of Polya’s principles. Arithmetic is a bad introductory domain for learning heuristic thinking. Turtle geometry is an excellent one. — location: 1244 ^ref-46820 --- In this chapter I show that this can be done and suggest that relating science to physical skills can do much more for learning science than providing what educators like to call a “motivation.” It can potentially place children in a position of feeling some identification with scientists through knowing that scientists use formal descriptive languages and knowing that they too can use such languages as tools for learning physical skills—juggling for example. The idea is to give children a way of thinking of themselves as “doing science” when they are doing something pleasurable with their bodies. — location: 1488 ^ref-27437 --- One does not expect anything to work at the first try. One does not judge by standards like “right—you get a good grade” and “wrong—you get a bad grade.” Rather one asks the question: “How can I fix it?” and to fix it one has first to understand what happened in its own terms. Only then can we make it happen on our terms. — location: 1556 ^ref-27504 --- the experience of programming helped both boys obtain a better grasp of their own actions, a more articulated sense of themselves. — location: 1609 ^ref-55127 --- It is easy to empathize. The ethic of school has rubbed off too well. What we see as a good program with a small bug, the child sees as “wrong,” “bad,” “a mistake.” School teaches that errors are bad; the last thing one wants to do is to pore over them, dwell on them, or think about them. The child is glad to take advantage of the computer’s ability to erase it all without any trace for anyone to see. The debugging philosophy suggests an opposite attitude. Errors benefit us because they lead us to study what happened, to understand what went wrong, and, through understanding, to fix it. — location: 1745 ^ref-51104 --- It speaks of all the times this child entered into teachers’ games of “let’s do that together” all the while knowing that the collaboration was a fiction. Discovery cannot be a setup; invention cannot be scheduled. — location: 1765 ^ref-39756 --- The too narrowly focused physics teacher might see all this as a waste of time: The real job is to understand physics. But I wish to argue for a different philosophy of physics education. It is my belief that learning physics consists of bringing physics knowledge into contact with very diverse personal knowledge. And to do this we should allow the learner to construct and work with transitional systems that the physicist may refuse to recognize as physics. — location: 1872 ^ref-62404 --- Our educational system rejects the “false theories” of children, thereby rejecting the way children really learn. And it also rejects discoveries that point to the importance of the false-theory learning path. Piaget has shown that children hold false theories as a necessary part of the process of learning to think. — location: 2053 ^ref-14078 --- Skills and the discrete facts are easy to give out in controlled doses. They are also easier to measure. And it is certainly easier to enforce the learning of a skill than it is to check whether someone has “gotten to know” an idea. — location: 2111 ^ref-23152 --- Working in Turtle microworlds is a model for what it is to get to know an idea the way you get to know a person. Students who work in these environments certainly do discover facts, make propositional generalizations, and learn skills. But the primary learning experience is not one of memorizing facts or of practicing skills. Rather, it is getting to know the Turtle, exploring what a Turtle can and cannot do. It is similar to the child’s everyday activities, such as making mudpies and testing the limits of parental authority—all of which have a component of “getting to know.” — location: 2114 ^ref-25197 --- <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">teaching is forced to overemphasize the quantitative by the accidents of a paper-and-pencil technology which favors work that can produce a definite “answer.” This is reinforced by a teaching system of using “laboratories” where experiments are done to prove, disprove, and “discover” already known propositions. This makes it very difficult for the student to find a way to constructively bring together intuitions and formal methods. Everyone is too busy following the cookbook.</mark> — location: 2168 ^ref-36542 --- GAL’s dialogue with ARI has something to teach us about one of the most destructive blocks to learning: the use of formal reasoning to put down intuitions. — location: 2254 ^ref-43822 --- Usually when a student in this plight goes to the physics teacher saying, “I think the gyroscope should fall instead of standing upright,” the teacher responds by writing an equation to prove that the thing stands upright. But that is not what the student needed. He already knew that it would stay upright, and this knowledge hurt by conflicting with intuition. By proving that it will stand upright the teacher rubs salt in the wound but does nothing to heal it. What the student needs is something quite different: better understanding of himself, not of the gyroscope. He wants to know why his intuition gave him a wrong expectation. He needs to know how to work on his intuitions in order to change them. — location: 2261 ^ref-10768 --- When one adds multidigit numbers, one is in fact acting as a computer in carrying through a procedure something like the program in Figure 18. 1. Set out numbers following conventional format. 2. Focus attention on the rightmost column. 3. Add as for single digit numbers. 4. If result <10 record results. 5. If result in rightmost column was equal to or greater than 10, then record rightmost digit and enter rest in next column to left. 6. Focus attention one column to left. 7. Go to line 3. Figure 18 To get better at this sort of activity one needs to know more about, and feel more comfortable with, the ways of procedures. And this, of course, is what a good computer experience allows. — location: 2376 ^ref-36277 --- First, he dissociates the operation of the procedure from his general store of knowledge. A better procedure would have an “error check” built into it. Since he could recognize the error when prompted, he certainly should have been capable of setting up the procedure to include prompting himself. Second, when he found the error he did not change, or even look at, the procedure, but merely changed the answer. Third, my knowledge of Ken tells me why he did not try to change the procedure. At the time of this incident he did not recognize procedures as entities, as things one could name, manipulate, or change. Thus, fixing his procedures is very far indeed from his awareness. The idea of procedures as things that can be debugged is a powerful, difficult concept for many children, until they have accumulated experience in working with them. — location: 2404 ^ref-9923 --- In this book I have clearly been arguing that procedural thinking is a powerful intellectual tool and even suggested analogizing oneself to a computer as a strategy for doing it. — location: 2427 ^ref-22584 --- true computer literacy is not just knowing how to make use of computers and computational ideas. It is knowing when it is appropriate to do so. — location: 2438 ^ref-63257 --- The Piaget of the stage theory is essentially conservative, almost reactionary, in emphasizing what children cannot do. I strive to uncover a more revolutionary Piaget, one whose epistemological ideas might expand known bounds of the human mind. — location: 2460 ^ref-64202 --- to make a machine that can be instructed in natural language, it is necessary to probe deeply into the nature of language. In order to make a machine capable of learning, we have to probe deeply into the nature of learning. And from this kind of research comes the broader definition of artificial intelligence: that of a cognitive science. — location: 2469 ^ref-62634 --- We propose to teach AI to children so that they, too, can think more concretely about mental processes. While psychologists use ideas from AI to build formal, scientific theories about mental processes, children use the same ideas in a more informal and personal way to think about themselves. And obviously I believe this to be a good thing in that the ability to articulate the processes of thinking enables us to improve them. — location: 2477 ^ref-34865 --- The bicycle without a rider balances perfectly well. With a novice rider it will fall. This is because the novice has the wrong intuitions about balancing and freezes the position of the bicycle so that its own corrective mechanism cannot work freely. Thus <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">learning to ride does not mean learning to balance, it means learning not to unbalance, learning not to interfere</mark>. — location: 2496 ^ref-21956 --- the structuralism of the Bourbaki school.1 Bourbaki is a pseudonym taken by a group of French mathematicians who set out to articulate a uniform theory for mathematics. — location: 2505 ^ref-57776 --- a research agenda that included separating what was most powerful in the idea of differential from the accidents of inaccessible formalisms. The goal was then to connect these scientifically fundamental structures with psychologically powerful ones. — location: 2539 ^ref-4913 --- Lawler set out to observe everything a six-year-old child, his daughter Miriam, did during a six-month period. The wealth of information he obtained allowed him to piece together a picture of the microstructure of Miriam’s growing abilities. For example, during this period Miriam learned to add, and Lawler was able to show that this did not consist of acquiring one logically uniform procedure. A better model of her learning to add is that she brought into a working relationship a number of idiosyncratic microworlds, each of which could be traced to identifiable, previous experiences. — location: 2556 ^ref-19826 --- Piaget’s epistemology is concerned not with the validity of knowledge but with its origin and growth. He is concerned with the genesis and evolution of knowledge, and marks this fact by describing his field of study as “genetic epistemology.” Traditional epistemology has often been taken as a branch of philosophy. Genetic epistemology works to assert itself as a science. Its students gather data and develop theories about how knowledge developed, sometimes focusing on the evolution of knowledge in history, sometimes on the evolution of knowledge in the individual. — location: 2562 ^ref-7382 --- Instead of seeking powerful deductive methods that would enable surprising conclusions to be drawn from general principles, the new approach assumes that people are able to think only because they can draw on larger pools of specific, particular knowledge. More often than we realize, we solve problems by “almost knowing the answer” already. Some researchers try to make programs be intelligent by giving them such quantities of knowledge that the greater part of solving a problem becomes its retrieval from somewhere in the memory. — location: 2616 ^ref-51147 --- Piaget has emphasized the importance for intellectual growth of children’s ability to reflect on their own thinking. The “mathetic paradox” lies in the fact that this reflection must be from within the child’s current intellectual system. — location: 2696 ^ref-61164 --- <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">In our culture number is richly represented, and systematic procedure is poorly represented.</mark> — location: 2796 ^ref-27939 --- Every American disco is a place for learning as well as for dancing. But the samba schools are very different. There is a greater social cohesion, a sense of belonging to a group, and a sense of common purpose. — location: 2841 ^ref-25508 --- In this book we have considered how mathematics might be learned in settings that resemble the Brazilian samba school, in settings that are real, socially cohesive, and where experts and novices are all learning. — location: 2844 ^ref-61235 --- Learning is not separate from reality. The samba school has a purpose, and learning is integrated in the school for this purpose. Novice is not separated from expert, and the experts are also learning. — location: 2847 ^ref-36834 --- Learning in our schools today is not significantly participatory—and doing sums is not an imitation of an exciting, recognizable activity of adult life. But writing programs for computer graphics or music and flying a simulated spaceship do share very much with the real activities of adults, even with the kind of adult who could be a hero and a role model for an ambitious child. — location: 2852 ^ref-23925 --- Students’ bugs become topics of conversation; as a result they develop an articulate and focused language to use in asking for help when it is needed. And when the need for help can be articulated clearly, the helper does not necessarily have to be a specially trained professional in order to give it. — location: 2871 ^ref-14139 --- When I ask myself whether this can change, I remind myself of the social nature of the question by remembering that the samba school was not designed by researchers, funded by grants, nor implemented by government action. It was not made. It happened. — location: 2882 ^ref-37066 --- Powerful new social forms must have their roots in the culture, not be the creatures of bureaucrats. Thus we are brought back to seeing the necessity for the educator to be an anthropologist. <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">Educational innovators must be aware that in order to be successful they must be sensitive to what is happening in the surrounding culture and use dynamic cultural trends as a medium to carry their educational interventions.</mark> — location: 2885 ^ref-64360 --- The research challenge is clear. We need to advance the art of meshing computers with cultures so that they can serve to unite, hopefully without homogenizing, the fragmented subcultures that coexist counterproductively in contemporary society. For example, the gulf must be bridged between the technical-scientific and humanistic cultures. And I think that the key to constructing this bridge will be learning how to recast powerful ideas in computational form, ideas that are as important to the poet as to the engineer. — location: 2922 ^ref-46288 --- By creating an intellectual environment in which the emphasis is on process, we give people with different skills and interests something to talk about. By developing expressive languages for talking about process and by recasting old knowledge in these new languages, we can hope to make transparent the barriers separating disciplines. — location: 2932 ^ref-60513 --- In current professional definitions physicists think about how to do physics, educators think about how to teach it. There is no recognized place for people whose research is really physics, but physics oriented in directions that will be educationally meaningful. — location: 2998 ^ref-29257 --- I have also been influenced by another study on “natural learning” now being conducted as part of research by Lawrence Miller for his thesis at Harvard. Both Lawler and Miller provided data for a general intellectual position that underlies this book: The best learning takes place when the learner takes charge. — location: 3447 ^ref-18858 --- Nicholas Negroponte is a constant source of inspiration, in part precisely because he defies categorization. — location: 3473 ^ref-17895 ---