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Volume 39, Numbers 3 & 4, 2000 MIT Media Laboratory  Table of contents: HTML PDF ASCII   This article: HTML PDF ASCII Copyright info     What's the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power - References by S. Papert Cited references and notes I use the word School with an uppercase S to refer to an abstraction to which individual schools conform to a lesser or greater extent. This distinction is discussed more fully in my book The Children's Machine, Basic Books, New York (1992). The key hardware used is the RCX™ “programmable brick” that forms the core of the LEGO Mindstorms line of products. Software is a subset of Logo (“Yellow Brick Logo”) that has not been made commercially available. For latest versions available to researchers see www.learningbarn.org. ‘I Won't Learn From You’: The Role of Assent in Learning, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, MN (1991). L. J. Pallidino, The Edison Trait: Saving the Spirit of Your Nonconforming Child, Random House, Inc., New York (1997). Basic Books, New York (1980). D. Tyack and L. Cuban, Tinkering Towards Utopia: A Century of School Reform, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1997). I am not sure whether it was Tyack or Cuban who is responsible for the apt summary: Reforms set out to change school; but in the end it is school that changes the reforms. Readers who follow my work will recognize the next two learning stories and may be inclined to skip over them. Don't. They have a different twist here. I. Harel, Children Designers: Interdisciplinary Constructions for Learning and Knowing Mathematics in a Computer-Rich School, Ablex Publishing, Norwood, NJ (1991). The project was made possible by the donation by IBM of several hundred computers, which allowed the installation of what was then an exceptionally large number for a school. In the Lamplighter School in Dallas, Texas. Jean Piaget is often credited with being the founder of the twentieth century study of the intelligence of children. See my essay on Piaget in www.papert.org/works.html/ for a brief assessment of Piaget as far more than that. S. Dahaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK (1997). Piaget's preferred name for his major field of work was “Epistemologie Genetique,” which he sharply distinguished from psychology, which he thought of as a neighboring field in which he sometimes participated. However since the community that accepted him most readily was that of developmental psychology he sometimes succumbed to its blandishments and allowed its name to be applied to all his work. The Logo commands should be sufficiently self-explanatory for any reader to follow. The version of Logo used is MicroWorlds, published by Logo Computer Systems Inc. In his recent MIT Ph.D. thesis, Technological Fluency and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, David Cavallo refers to a cognate trio of properties as “roots, shoots, and fruits.” Note the word “can.” Some studies showed positive effects; some did not. Methodologically the positive reports have the merit of describing something real even if it was not what I had in mind. The negative ones only proved that under the particular conditions of that experiment, nothing happened that could be measured by the particular tests used. It is a remarkable commentary on the culture of the educational psychology community that some of these were widely cited as proving that Logo has no effect. The Journal of Learning Sciences 6, No. 4, 417­427 (1997); available on line via www.papert.org/works.html.

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