Preface to Minds in Play by Seymour Papert
In the wake of the advent of inexpensive microcomputers in the
late 1970s came the first wave of nonprofessional programmers.
Children, older students, teachers, and computer hobbyists took
to the keyboard to find an experience that nobody had been able
to have in previous generations. And in the wake of the in-terest
in programming came a search for programmable project areas-you
can't program without programming something. By the early 1980s,
habits had set in. In the schools, the presence of the Logo turtle
favored projects involving graphics. Teachers learning to program
often looked for topics that would have an instructional function.
Adult hobbyists implemented on their lit-tle computers simple
forms of "system programs" that existed on the big machines
but had not yet permeated down as they have today. Across the
board a scattering of these new programmers embarked on projects
to create another kind of entity that had come into being with
the microchip. In popular parlance the video game was almost becoming
synonymous with the idea of a home computer and the challenge
of making one's own had an obvious appeal.
It is interesting to reflect on why making video games did not
become a more important part of the school computer culture. The
superficial answer is technical. Think back 10 years to the situation
in a typical school computer lab. The machines are Apple II computers.
The programming language is Apple Logo. With this combination
it is possible to make a playable game, but the threshold
of skill and effort needed is very high and the final re-sult
needs a stretch of imagination to be classed as a "real game."
No wonder making a game was something that would be under-taken
mostly by the exceptionally bold students and was seldom promoted
by teachers as the thing to do.
This technical explanation certainly tells a part of the story,
and is reinforced by noting that an increase in game-making is
coming about simply as a result of improvements in hardware and
software. I have observed many students and teachers in computer
labs or workshops taking advantage of the fact that MicroWorlds
Logo running on the newest Mac or IBM makes games as easy to program
as the static graphics that became identified with the use of
Logo 10 years ago. But there is much more to the story of video
games in educational than technological evolution. Indeed, something
that will more powerfully, and more deeply, facilitate a more
massive entry of video game programming into schools is Yasmin
Kafai's initiative in bringing this activity into the arena of
central concerns of contemporary education theory.
As a background to this remark, it is instructive to note an oversimplification
inherent in using the evolution of the technology as an explanation
of what happens in schools. There is a two-way street: The evolution
of the technology has, to a significant degree, been influenced
by (as well as influencing) the culture of educational computing.
To see an example, let me recall that in the very early 1980s
computers with names like Atari and TI 99/4 were at least as well
represented in schools as the Apple II; and because these computers
were designed to serve also as game machines, they had hardware
features that facilitated programming dynamic actions needed by
games but also by other kinds of animation that open to children
the opportunity to manipulate and understand many key concepts
in science and mathematics. The Apple II was a wonderful workhorse
that we all came to love for what it could do. But there was so
much these other ma-chines did better that the development of
educational computing was significantly retarded by Apple's market
victory. Clearly the world of education (which includes research
communities and the Washington bureaucracies as well as schools),
did not value what these machines could do enough to fight for
them.
What I value most in Kafai's work is its contribution to valuing
the activity of making a game. I don't mean this merely quantita-tively.
Articles about computers vie with one another in telling their
audience how very exciting such and such an activity is for the
students-or even how important it is for society that children
should be engaged in this or that. Kafai also does some of that;
but what differentiates her writing from the general "run"
is paying serious attention, not only to the detail of what exactly
these students are doing, but especially to the categories of
theoret-ical inquiry that should be brought to bear on understanding
these details. And by doing this well she also makes a contribution
in the other sense: in the end her writing will serve to show
educa-tion theorists a new domain from which to enrich their ideas.
Game-making emerges not only as important to the children (and
others) who do it, but also to theorists who want to understand
the process of intellectual doing, thinking, and learning.
Perhaps the most important way in which game-making is a theoretically
important domain is the emphasis it lays on importance
as a category in thinking about what situations are good for learning.
Literature on school improvement is full of exhortations to make
the content of instruction "relevant." In this theoretical
perspective the Kafai's work highlights the need for more discussion
about what constitutes relevance for a ten-year old. Certainly
not connecting school arithmetic with the supermarket! Connec-ting
school science with environmental activism is a much better way
to invest learning with importance. But if one does be-long to
a culture in which video games are important, transform-ing oneself
from a consumer to a producer of games may well be an even more
powerful way for some children to find importance in what they
are doing.
My point here is not to argue about which source of a sense of
importance is best but to note how reflection on game-making is
an excellent medium for exploring multiple dimensions-psychological,
cultural, mathetic-of this aspect of the learning environment.
It is also an excellent medium for highlighting the issues raised
by posing an opposition in educational thinking between instructionism
and constructionism.
Every educator must have felt some envy watching children playing
video games: If only that energy could be mobilized in the service
of learning something that the educator values. But the envy can
take very different forms. Instructionists show their orientation
by concretizing the wish as a desire for games that will teach
math or spelling or geography or whatever. The Construc-tionist
mind is revealed when the wish leads to imagin-ing children making
the games instead of just playing them. Rather than wanting games
to instruct children they yearn to see children construct games.
Accepting the honor of writing a preface carries the obligation
offering some advice to readers. These two examples of connections
made by this book between games and fundamental theoret-ical issues
will suffice to give meaning to mine which I'll state as an appeal
to read this work on the multiple levels given it by the richness
of its author's mind. The book offers a very practicable model
from which teachers can draw inspiration in their work with computers.
It should embolden them to see importance in what some might dismiss
as mere games. The book also offers a model to researchers (and
I say this without presuming that teachers and even students should
not be included here) in devel-oping thick descriptions of the
process of doing a project. Finally to theorists (and again the
term is inclusive) it offers not only its author's theoretical
insights but also a rich field in which to grow their own.
-Seymour Papert