Nearly 30 years ago, Seymour Papert and colleagues initiated a research project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), dedicated to the study of how children think and learn, and to the development of novel educational approaches and technological tools to help children learn new things in new ways.
During the past three decades, that research effort has evolved
and grown. One of its technological offspring, the programming
language Logo, has been used by tens of millions of schoolchildren
all over the world. At the same time, its theoretical foundation,
which has become known as "constructionism," has deeply
influenced how educators and researchers think about directions
for educational reform-and, within that context, about the roles
for technology in learning.
Constructionism is both a theory of learning and a strategy for
education. It builds on the "constructivist" theories
of Jean Piaget, asserting that knowledge is not simply transmitted
from teacher to student, but actively constructed by the mind
of the learner. Children don't get ideas; they make ideas. Moreover,
constructionism suggests that learners are particularly likely
to make new ideas when they are actively engaged in making some
type of external artifact-be it a robot, a poem, a sand castle,
or a computer program-which they can reflect upon and share with
others. Thus, constructionism involves two intertwined types of
construction: the construction of knowledge in the context of
building personally-meaningful artifacts.
In 1991, Papert's research group at the MIT Media Lab published
a collection of papers under the title Constructionism, edited
by Idit Harel and Seymour Papert. This current collection is,
in some ways, a follow-on to the Constructionism book. Many of
the ideas and projects presented here grew out of research described
in Constructionism. But this collection also addresses new issues
and steers into new directions. Constructionism is not a static
set of ideas. Consistent with the theory we are writing about,
we as researchers are continually reconstructing and elaborating
what we mean by constructionism, and continually constructing
new educational activities and tools to help us in that effort.
For example, readers will notice a greater emphasis on ideas related
to "community" in this volume. Of course, those ideas
have always been a part of the Logo research effort, as evidenced
by Papert's discussion of samba schools in Mindstorms. But they
play a more prominent role in many of the papers here.
In some ways, constructionist research is challenged by its success.
A decade ago, many constructionist ideas were viewed as radical
and out of the mainstream. But today, at educational research
conferences, the idea that children actively construct new knowledge
is taken almost as gospel. And a growing number of research efforts
are studying how children learn through design and invention activities.
The challenge is to continue to refine constructionist ideas,
and to make sure that these ideas spread not only to members of
the educational research community, but also to the classrooms,
homes, and community centers where children work, play, and learn.
This collection includes 14 papers, divided into four sections:
Perspectives in Constructionism; Learning through Design; Learning
in Communities; Learning about Systems. These sections are somewhat
arbitrary and possibly misleading, since many of the papers cut
across the boundaries. But the section themes provide a general
framework for understanding some of the core issues in constructionist
research today.
Perspectives in Constructionism
One of the main tenets of constructionism is that learners actively
construct and reconstruct knowledge out of their experiences in
the world. It places special emphasis on the knowledge construction
that takes place when learners are engaged in building objects.
Constructionism differs from other learning theories along several
dimensions. Whereas most theories describe knowledge acquisition
in purely cognitive terms, constructionism sees an important role
for affect. It argues that learners are most likely to become
intellectually engaged when they are working on personally-meaningful
activities and projects. In constructionist learning, forming
new relationships with knowledge is as important as forming new
representations of knowledge. Constructionism also emphasizes
diversity: it recognizes that learners can make connections with
knowledge in many different ways. Constructionist learning environments
encourage multiple learning styles and multiple representations
of knowledge. The chapters in this section explore these core
constructionist ideas, further developing the intellectual underpinnings
of what we mean by constructionism.
In his paper, "A Word for Learning," Seymour Papert
wonders why theories of teaching have received far more attention
than theories of learning, and he addresses the fundamental issues
of what we mean by the word "learning." He invites us
to revisit our notions of learning through examining a personal
experience. Using the example of learning flower names, Papert
illustrates two important aspects of learning: "The simple
moral is that learning explodes when you stay with it: A full
year had passed before the effect in my mind reached a critical
level for an exponential explosion of growth. The more complex
moral is that some domains of knowledge, such as plants, are especially
rich in connections and particularly prone to give rise to explosions
of knowledge." The time to build personal connections is
an essential ingredient strikingly absent from most school learning
situations.
The next chapter, "Perspective-Taking and Object Construction"
by Edith Ackermann, also addresses the issue of relationships
with knowledge. Ackermann brings together Piagetian and situated-cognition
approaches, illustrating how the alternation between assimilative
and accommodative attitudes punctuates an individual's interactions
with the world. Drawing on results from the study of perspective-taking,
Ackermann argues that the ability to decenter from one's own standpoint
and to take another person's point of view requires the construction
of cognitive invariants: a recasting of the world's stabilities
that transcends any given viewpoint. According to Ackermann, this
separation is a necessary step toward the construction of a deeper
understanding; adopting a god's eye view is by no means contrary
to situating one's own stance in the world. Ackermann notes that
the process of learning includes opposites: forging relationships
and creating separations at the same time. One cannot relate without,
at times, separating.
In the last chapter, "Elementary School Children's Images
of Science," Aaron Brandes introduces the framework of image
of science as a tool for understanding and enhancing children's
science learning. Science-education research has established that
children's science learning depends critically on their ideas
about science, scientists, and experimentation. Brandes extends
this research to include affective components such as the child's
identification with science or alienation from it. He describes
three studies with elementary-school students, designed to probe
children's images of science. The studies show that children's
excitement about science decreases with age, even as their ideas
about science become, in many ways, more sophisticated. Furthermore,
the process by which new knowledge is generated remains mysterious,
leaving most children on the "outside" of science. In
his conclusions, Brandes proposes criteria for evaluating science
activities, based on his images-of-science framework.
Learning through Design
Constructionist theory suggests a strong connection between design
and learning: it asserts that activities involving making, building,
or programming-in short, designing-provide a rich context for
learning. But design and learning have not always been viewed
so closely connected. Theories of design and learning have very
different origins. Traditionally, design theorists have been interested
primarily in the final product, and in the ways that constraints
influence the design of the product. By contrast, learning theorists
were interested primarily in process, not product.
Recently, however, theories of learning and design have begun
to move toward one another. Both design theorists and learning
theorists now view "construction of meaning" as a core
process. In this view, design involves building a relationship
between designer and object. Designers sort out what objects mean
to them or others, and they selectively connect features of an
object and features of a context into a coherent unity. The relationships
that designers build with objects or situations constitute the
core focus of design theory; the final artifact itself is secondary.
Design is now viewed as the process through which a designer comes
to understand not only objective constraints but also subjective
meanings.
In this way, design theories overlap with constructivist learning
theories: both focus on the construction of meaning. At the same
time, learning theorists have begun to pay more attention to the
role of product and artifact. Constructionist theory goes beyond
Piaget's constructivism in its emphasis on artifacts, asserting
that meaning-construction happens particularly well when learners
are engaged in building external and sharable artifacts. Thus,
there is a convergence in the fields of design and learning, with
a natural intersection in the study of learning-through-design.
The chapters in this section aim to contribute to the study of
design and learning, exploring the nature of learning through
design, its cultural contexts, activities, and tools.
In the first chapter in this section, "Learning Design by
Making Games," Yasmin Kafai examines learning through design
in a rather unusual context: video games. These games are a central
part of late 20th-century children's culture. In the playing of
video games, children mobilize energies which many educators,
parents, and researchers wish would be dedicated to learning.
Whereas most conventional efforts have sought to harness these
energies in the form of playing educational games, Kafai presents
a different perspective: in children making their own video games
instead of playing games made by others. In a six-month project,
a class of fourth graders was asked to design computer games to
teach fractions to younger students. In the analysis of the students'
learning experiences, Kafai focuses on students' development of
project management skills-how students approached and managed
this complex task. The paper analyzes students' first steps in
beginning the project and framing the design task, and their development
of programming strategies. The results provide insights into the
project's evolution, the different approaches chosen by students,
and potential support structures for young designers.
In her second paper, "Electronic Play Worlds," Kafai
takes a close look at the video game artifacts designed by children
to address the issue of gender differences. In studying the popularity
of video games among children, many researchers have focused on
explaining why boys in particular love playing these games. In
this paper, Kafai uses the process of game design to elicit children's
ideas and interests in video games. The students' choices are
analyzed and discussed in regard to their game themes, worlds,
characters, interactions, feedback, and narrative. The design
of the games reveal clear gender-related differences and provide
strong support for design activities as a way for children to
express their personal preferences. Conclusions address the potential
of game-making environments.
In his chapter, "The Art of Design," Greg Gargarian
examines the relationships between design and interpretation,
reasoning in dynamic problem contexts, and the role of concept
design in artifact design. He sees design (and learning) as a
process in which designers customize their working environment
around the artifact under design. Furthermore, designers are engaged
in the process of situated planning as a means of reducing design
problems to conventional ones. To illustrate the intertwined nature
of designing and learning, he presents the Textile Designer, a
computer-based environment that preserves the qualities found
in design environments predating computers. In his final section,
he reflects on the nature of future learning environments that
allow for the creation of a commonwealth of skills. The discovery
villages, as he calls these design-based learning environments,
bring together the arts and the sciences, school and play, and
work and life.
In the last chapter of this section, "Building and Learning
with Programmable Bricks," Randy Sargent, Mitchel Resnick,
Fred Martin, and Brian Silverman discuss the applications and
implications of the Programmable Brick-a tiny, portable computer
embedded inside a LEGO brick, capable of interacting with the
physical world in a large variety of ways. Programmable Bricks
make possible a wide range of new design activities for students
in robotics and ubiquitous computing, a new research field that
aims to spread computation throughout the environment, embedding
computation in all types of objects and artifacts. The authors
describe initial results from three types of applications: building
active environments in which children use Programmable Bricks
as sensors and regulators; making autonomous creatures that display
various behaviors; and personal science experiments to monitor
and control everyday phenomena. The authors conclude with a list
of 20 things to do with Programmable Bricks.
Learning in Communities
In the minds of many, Rodin's famous sculpture The Thinker provides
the prototypical image of thinking: it shows a person, alone,
in deep concentration. This image of the "individual thinker"
plays a strong role in our culture. In most school classrooms,
children must work on worksheets and tests on their own. In the
scientific world, Nobel prizes are given to individuals, not teams.
So it is not surprising that computers, when they first entered
school classrooms, were used primarily for individualized learning.
There were debates about "computer as tutor" vs. "computer
as tool." But the unspoken consensus was that the computer
was a tutor or a tool for an individual learner.
In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the social
nature of learning. There is a growing appreciation for the role
that communities play in the learning process: community members
act as collaborators, coaches, audience, and co-constructors of
knowledge. In the educational-research literature, there is new
attention to communities of practice, knowledge-building communities,
and computer support for collaborative learning.
The idea of community has always been present in the constructionist
vision. In Mindstorms, written in 1980, Papert discusses the Brazilian
samba school as an example of a community of learners. But many
of the early constructionist studies focused on the development
of the individual learner. It is only in recent years that ideas
of community have emerged as a major theme in constructionist
research. The chapters in this section examine the nature of learning
in many types of communities: classroom communities, urban communities,
and virtual communities.
In the first chapter, "Social Constructionism and the Inner
City," Alan Shaw focuses on the challenges facing underprivileged
urban communities. He describes a set of new tools and activities
that he created to support growth and development in a Boston
inner-city neighborhood known as Four Corners. Shaw developed
a computer networking system called MUSIC (Multi-User Sessions
in Community) that neighborhood residents used to discuss community
issues and organize community activities. Using a theoretical
framework that he calls "social constructionism," Shaw
examines how such tools and activities support not only the development
of individuals within the community but the development of the
community itself.
Whereas Shaw explores constructionist ideas in the context of
a proximal (geographically connected) community, Amy Bruckman
and Mitchel Resnick explore them in the context of a virtual community
on the Internet. In "The MediaMOO Project: Constructionism
and Professional Community," Bruckman and Resnick describe
a networked virtual-reality environment known as MediaMOO, designed
to enhance community among media researchers. In MediaMOO, participants
not only interact in a virtual world, they help construct (and
continually reconstruct) the world in which they interact. Bruckman
and Resnick explore how this combination of construction and community
could lead to new possibilities for learning.
Michele Evard examines a different type of network-based community
in her chapter: "A Community of Designers: Learning through
Exchanging Questions and Answers." Evard examines how a computer-based
network allowed elementary-school children to share ideas with
one another during an extended design project. Her study focuses
on two classes. In one class, children were designing their own
video games; another class of children, who had already designed
games, acted as consultants on the network. The children exchanged
questions and answers with one another through a Usenet-style
"newsgroup." Evard analyzes usage patterns of the network,
examines the nature of interactions among children on the network,
and discusses the evolving sense of community among the participants.
In the final chapter of the section, "They Have Their Own
Thoughts," Paula Hooper describes her research at an African-centered
community school. The school, Paige Academy, aims to create a
community and culture rooted in African-American ways of knowing,
values, and interactions. Hooper presents a "learning story"
of an 8-year-old girl working on a Logo project. The story examines
how children, in the process of making new computational artifacts,
can take control of their own learning, developing and extending
their own ideas. It also highlights the need for school environments
to support and legitimize children's own personal ways of thinking
and mental and physical constructs.
Learning about Systems
In discussions about computers in education, the focus is usually
on how children learn. And, indeed, some uses of computers can
bring about profound changes in how children learn. But often
overlooked are the parallel opportunities for transforming what
children learn. Current school curricula were created in the era
of paper and pencil. The current mathematics curriculum, for example,
is not necessarily the best or most appropriate mathematics for
children to learn; rather, it is the mathematics that is most
accessible with paper and pencil. As new tools and new media become
available, we must rethink the content of mathematics and other
subject domains.
One area ripe for rethinking is the study of systems. The world
is full of systems (biological, technological, and social) consisting
of many interacting parts. Such systems are very difficult to
understand, and often impossible to analyze with traditional pre-college
mathematics. But new computational tools can open up new approaches
for studying and understanding the behaviors of systems. The chapters
in this section discuss the barriers to understanding systems
concepts (such as feedback and self-organization), and they describe
computational tools and activities designed to support new ways
of thinking about such concepts.
In the first chapter, "New Paradigms for Computing, New Paradigms
for Thinking," Mitchel Resnick argues that new computational
paradigms (such as object-oriented programming and parallelism)
can significantly influence not only what people do with computers,
but how they make sense of the world. In particular, he describes
a parallel-programming language, called StarLogo, that he designed
to help students explore decentralized systems, such as bird flocks,
traffic jams, and market economies. By building models with StarLogo,
students can move beyond the "centralized mindset" and
develop a deeper understanding of decentralized systems.
Uri Wilensky uses StarLogo towards a different goal: to help learners
develop their intuitive conceptions of probabilistic ideas. In
Wilensky's chapter, "Learning Probability through Paradox
and Programming," he presents a case study of a learner who
uses programming to help resolve a probability paradox, and in
the process develops stronger intuitions about randomness and
distribution-and the connections between them. Wilensky's study
illustrates that the primary obstacles to learning probability
are conceptual and epistemological, and it shows how programming
can play a powerful role in learning mathematics by making hidden
assumptions explicit and concrete.
In the final chapter, "Ideal and Real Systems," Fred
Martin probes students' thinking about systems in the context
of a robot-design competition that he helped designed for MIT
undergraduates. Martin analyzes how and why undergraduates have
trouble developing effective strategies for controlling their
robots. He shows that students tend to build robots that will
perform properly only under ideal conditions, not in the "messiness"
of the real world. Martin calls for a change in undergraduate
engineering education, arguing that the standard engineering curriculum
encourages design strategies that are not appropriate for many
real-world technological systems.
This book would not have been possible without the help of many
people. All of the authors made major contributions of time, thought,
and energy. Our current work benefits from the past and continuing
contributions of the extended Logo community, including many former
members of the Epistemology and Learning Group at the MIT Media
Lab. We are grateful to Wanda Gleason and Florence Williams for
helping with many organizational and editing tasks, and to Jacqueline
Karaaslanian and Mai Cleary for providing general administrative
support. The National Science Foundation, the LEGO Group, IBM,
Nintendo, and the News in the Future Consortium have been generous
in their support of this research. Finally, we would like to thank
Seymour Papert for inspiring all of us to think in new ways about
learning, children, minds, and computers.
Yasmin Kafai
Mitchel Resnick
May 1995