From Alan Kay

Genealogy of Constructivism, LOGO, Alan Kay, Dynabook, Scratch, LEGO Mindstorms

First, let’s create a rough map of what’s currently in my mind:

  • Constructivism (Education)

    • When learning about what LOGO is, one cannot ignore the presence of Seymour Papert, one of its creators. He is currently an honorary professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, so from now on, let’s refer to him as Professor Papert. Professor Papert is a mathematician and a developmental psychologist who has made significant contributions in the field of educational computing and artificial intelligence, which he researched in collaboration with Marvin Minsky. In the 1960s, having studied under the famous psychologist Jean Piaget at the University of Geneva, he was greatly influenced and proposed a new educational theory called “Constructionism.” Constructionism suggests that learners create something by interacting with their environment and through recognizing it, new understanding and knowledge are produced. In other words, knowledge structures are not taught by third parties like teachers but are created by the learners themselves. This can be seen as an antithesis to the prevalent practice of cramming education into children that still exists today.

  • 1972

      1. Introduced the concept of “Dynabook,” a personal computer for “children of all ages” to support people’s intellectual activities in a paper.
  • Object-Oriented

https://www.infoq.com/jp/articles/Scratch/

The idea that programming and debugging, rather than just acquiring a programming language, contribute to the development of children’s mental frameworks was introduced by Seymour Papert of MIT in the 1960s. The LOGO language was created to put this idea into practice. Inspired by LOGO in 1968, Alan Kay conceptualized the “personal computer for children of all ages,” namely Dynabook in 1972, which led to developments in Smalltalk, GUI (Graphical User Interface), and object-oriented programming. Under Papert’s guidance, Rasnick developed Scratch, drawing inspiration from Kay’s Squeak Etoys, Randy Pausch’s Alice, and Alexander Repenning’s AgentSheets. Scratch has the following features: