Varsity's Play

I’ve noticed a lot of essays related to computers and education in this book….

This one, however, was very interesting in that it caught my attention in the very first paragraph: “The computer programming the child…. The child programs the computer. And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves think.” This totally makes sense to me. In my experience, I have always learned something better when I taught it to other people as well as to myself. Like Papert says, because the child is doing something active with the computer the knowledge becomes a source of power.

     There  is also some recursion present in this piece : “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.” (I had to look up epistemologist- a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge.) I found this interesting that a computer can have this much impact on a child’s thinking.