One of the key ‘powerful ideas’ that comes up in Mindstorms is the idea of procedural thinking. I can’t recall if Papert uses this phrase, but what I mean by it is, being able to think about a sequence of actions and break it down into smaller sub-procedures.  This is a fundamental practice in computer programming, although in modern object-oriented programming it also extends to grouping a problem’s set of data and procedures into smaller subdomains called ‘objects’.  Still, with or without objects, writing your own procedures (or functions or methods or whatever they’re called in your language of choice) is how we take the massive task of “Do this huge set of actions” into smaller parts that the programmer can wrap their brain around at once.  In LOGO this is done by essentially defining a new word: “TO DOTHIS” would create a new verb, DOTHIS, in the sense of “To do this thing, you should …”etc.

Papert extends this idea into the realm of a metacognitive “powerful idea” in a few different directions.  Once someone has the idea of breaking down a complicated task into smaller, “mind-sized bites” (in the words of a grade 7 student quoted in the book), they can apply this to other complex tasks outside of computing.  Papert even extends this to physical education with a research study done by one of his colleagues on teaching students to juggle, breaking it down to smaller sub-skills of “TOSS RIGHT”, “TOSS LEFT”, etc.

This seems pretty huge. Computing is definitely not the first or only domain where people have understood breaking large tasks down into smaller sub-tasks.  But it does provide an environment where students can easily create their own complex tasks and wrestle with the complexity.  This is, I think, pretty unusual – in most areas of life, the challenge of a complex task is primarily in actually doing things.  In computing, we are scripting commands and the computer does all the “doing” for us.  So in effect the challenge of “doing” is removed, leaving only the challenge of wrestling with exactly what to do.  Students experimenting in a rich computing environment will end up discovering the problem of managing complexity as a natural effect of playful building, and won’t mistake this for a problem in how they are “doing” the tasks.

Okay. This is all great, seems like an obvious win for creative computing education.

So why did Scratch leave this out?

In Scratch, kids do get exposure to a pretty nice laundry list of advanced computing concepts: events, parallel programming / threads, objects, variables, lists, and plenty of I/O options.  But Scratch left out the ability to create new “procedures” or blocks.  This omission was glaring enough that a separate project branched off from Scratch with the sole purpose of adding this feature (initially called ‘BYOB’ for Build Your Own Blocks, now rebranded as Snap).

The fact that there’s an “advanced” version with this ability is great and fills the gap.  I’m not really arguing whether they should or shouldn’t have included that in Scratch in the first place.  I’m just kind of startled to realize how weird it is that they left it out.  Procedural thinking seems to be the biggest advantage, the most important “powerful idea” that Papert sees in introducing kids to computing.

I’m sure this was left out on purpose.  I just wish I knew the reason why.  In LOGO, allowing a student to create a new verb was relatively natural.  Was this concept too hard to integrate into the visual model for the UI in a way that younger students would understand?  Or was this tool seen as adding too much complexity – despite the fact that it exists precisely to reduce complexity?

EDIT: John Golden posted this to the Learning Creative Learning MOOC community (a course run by the same MIT lab that founded LOGO and Scratch) and the responses are interesting. In particular, Natalie Rusk offers some behind-the-scenes answers to the questions I had. (Sometimes the internet is fantastic.)

So far I’ve done a lot of critiquing and sniping. Let me just finally make one post that straight-up says this is some fascinating stuff in here.

One of the thing that surprised me about Mindstorms was that the phrase “Powerful Ideas” in the book’s subtitle wasn’t just a vague, positive sounding statement.  It’s something that Papert takes a full chapter to elaborate on, as well as working it into much of the rest of the book.

Papert’s “powerful ideas” are the sort of thing we would probably wrap into the fancy-sounding phrase of “metacognition strategies” or something like that.  It’s ideas about how to think.

Papert’s key example in this chapter is a hypothetical discussion between GAL and ARI on the nature of gravity and two falling weights.  ARI believes Aristotle’s view of gravity and claims that a heavier body will fall faster.  GAL poses the case of two identical ten-pound metal weights falling – ARI says, of course they will fall at the same speed, they are independent bodies.

GAL: But now if I connect them with a gossamer thread … is this now two bodies or one?  Will it (or they) take two seconds or four to fall to the ground?

ARI is confounded – if they are one body, then somehow this flimsy thread is making a hurtling metal ball go faster, which seems absurd.  But if they are two bodies … BOGGLE.

The point Papert makes with this example is not just that our Galilean thinker was more clever.  It’s that he had the “powerful idea” of thinking of an object as being made up of smaller objects.  This powerful idea of subdividing and combining objects enabled him to construct a scenario that brought ARI’s misconceptions about gravity to light.

This is probably the most convincing explanation I’ve heard yet for the idea that we as teachers are in the business of teaching kids how to think.  Usually this seems like crazy talk to me – or, really, like the only ones actually getting to do this for a living are the English teachers, and those of us teaching math / computing / science / etc are just caught up in wishful thinking.  But Papert’s idea of the value of computing as metacognitive tool is an interesting one.

He doesn’t limit powerful ideas to computing, but suggests that the advent of popular computing will open up a large number of new “powerful ideas” that previously weren’t part of our everyday lives.  Many of these are along the lines of modelling the workings of our own minds as being similar to computing – we mentally create distinct “threads” (mentioned in the epilogue), we can break down processes into steps and subroutines, etc.  (In the foreward he does mention that he isn’t intending to promote logical, structured thinking as the core model of our mind any more than he sees that as the only useful model of computing, despite most examples being along those lines.)

I wish I knew more about where research has gone with this in the time since this was written.  I vaguely recall from my ed psych class the thought that metacognitive strategies are powerful, but often don’t transfer between subjects/topics unless they’re explicitly reinforced as general strategies.  But perhaps the metaphor of computer as a thinking machine makes the cross-pollination of these ideas from thinking-about-computing to thinking-about-thinking much easier than usual.

Not sure if I’m going to get every idea on my list blogged following up my reading of Mindstorms, but here’s a quick one off the list.

There’s another problem with the samba school comparison that Papert makes that was bothering me … actually it bothered me well before reading that chapter, but the samba school model just served to give it clarity.

I found myself having a really hard time getting past the first half of the book – I would just stall out and set the book down for days, or a couple of weeks.  This isn’t unusual and it’s a tough read (especially those first chapters), but this was something else.  Finally I realized what was going on – I was sick of reading about this utopian vision that completely sidestepped discussion of systematic inequality in education.  If this Mathland was just going to make the rich get richer, I didn’t want any part of it.

Once I realized that was the problem, I could do a bit of hunting and answer that question for myself.  Did the MIT Media Lab people who were creating and working with LOGO care about making a positive difference towards equality?  While I didn’t do a lot of digging, it wasn’t hard to find evidence pointing to a giant YES.

This is good, but I’m still concerned.  There are just too many tech-utopian visions out there that don’t seem to give a rip about equality.  It’s not to say I’m faulting Papert for not addressing it in this particular book – maybe it’s out there in his later works, and he does mention the absence of a connection to feminism or multiculturalism in the 2nd edition foreward.

Still, when we look at the samba school comparison, we can see this problem yet again.  The samba schools described were social clubs with memberships, not public schools available equally to all.  There’s no discussion of fees for membership, but it seems safe to assume they weren’t freely available to all.  The samba school as an ideal requires parental buy-in for their children to be signed up and brought to the dance lessons.  This is all well and good in a world where samba is already culturally valued, but in a world where we’re fighting against a pervasive mathphobia and anti-intellectual attitude in North American culture as a whole, how is this going to help?  How is holding up this ideal going to do anything but make the gap worse?

Given what I know now about the Lifelong Kindergarten group, I think it’s likely that Papert and others running the LOGO environments had these questions in mind too.  They may even have invited students from low-income neighbourhoods into their LOGO sessions free of charge, I don’t know.  But I think they may be missing something fundamentally wrong in this extracurricular mindset.

Frankly I think the ideal is what I’m fortunate enough to do for a living right now.  I get to let kids explore computational thinking using Scratch as part of their Digital Media explorations class in a middle school.  Nearly every grade 6 and 7 student gets a chance to come through my classroom.  No elective, no opt-in, no needing to sign up after school, no competing with sports commitments, etc.  I don’t think this is a solution to everything Papert’s ideal Mathland was hoping to solve, but I think it’s a heck of a lot closer to making a difference than a sign-up samba school.  I may end up running some extra after-school stuff at some point, but right now I’m pretty happy knowing that every kid in the grade, no matter their interests or gender or economic status or race or family stability, is getting a chance to play with powerful ideas in my classroom.

In my last post I summed up some of the similarities between Papert’s ideal that he saw in the Brazilian samba schools and what his group was creating in their “Logo environments”.  Now it’s time to talk about the difference that he brings up – the relation to culture.

The samba school has rich connections with a popular culture. The knowledge being learned there is continuous with that culture. The LOGO environments are artificially maintained oases where people encounter knowledge … that has been separated from the mainstream of the surrounding culture, indeed which is even in opposition to values expressed in that surrounding culture.

The knowledge he’s speaking of is that of computation and mathematics.  This brings us full circle to what Papert wrote about at length in the opening chapters of the book – the contrast between an ideal Mathland, and the math-phobic Western culture of the 1970’s (and equally much of today).

Mathland, in Papert’s terms, is a social and technological environment in which children would learn mathematics as naturally as they learn language.  (I tried not to cringe too much when he wrote of children learning language “automatically”, as though parents and caregivers had nothing to do with it. But see my last post, I suppose.)  In Mathland, mathematics is something one can grasp and manipulate, play around with, do something creative with.

This wasn’t an entirely magical fantasy.  In their LOGO workshops, children were exploring concepts of number and geometry for their own purposes – to draw a certain picture, or to explore visual patterns.

What’s more, the personal computer was exploding into being on the market.  And for the most part every one of those computers was a gateway into computational thinking in the form of a blinking BASIC cursor.  (Which wasn’t Papert’s ideal – he thought BASIC was far inferior to LOGO for enabling computational exploration. But … well, I’m getting to that.)  This is huge.  At that time, every person’s first experience in personal computing was a command-line powered by an honest-to-goodness programming language.  Even kids who mostly just loaded games onto their C64 were likely to at least type 10 PRINT “HA HA I AM AWESOME”: 20 GOTO 10 at some point.  They may even have typed in some short programs or one-liners from the manual or from a magazine.  They knew that programming was there, waiting for them.

Mathland was seemingly within our grasp.  All that was missing was a culture willing to accept it.

So where is Mathland now?

Don’t need no math here. Go away.

Now we have a world of ubiquitous computing in which computational thinking is entirely optional.  Whereas personal computing used to put programming directly in people’s hands, modern GUI computing hides it from view.  Programming is viewed as esoteric and inaccessible to the layman – and frankly, most programming environments are a royal pain to even get started in.  The most common programming language used in education requires class structures and methods with wonky cryptic keywords just to print “Hello World!” to the screen.  Apple’s revolutionary new iThings have given us Star Trek style computing but have aggressively limited the ability to program their devices for the sake of their business model.  (They’re reluctantly easing these restrictions now. Sort of. I think.)

I’m not at all saying we should throw away the GUI, or that it’s evil (although it’s insane how mystical people’s view of the command-line has become).  The point is simply that business and usability concerns have driven computing in the opposite direction from Mathland.  Ubiquitous computing as we experience it today has done next to nothing to shift the popular culture towards computational thinking or away from its math phobia.

Back to Papert:

…at the same time as this massive penetration of the technology is taking place, there is a social movement afoot … an increasing disillusion with traditional education. …I believe that these two trends can come together in a way that would be good for children, for parents, and for learning.  This is through the construction of educationally powerful computational environments that will provide alternatives to traditional classrooms and traditional instruction.

Maybe they can.  And certainly this has happened on a small scale in small pockets: involved parents getting kids to use something like Scratch, an after-school club here and there, and the occasional classroom like mine.  But Papert seems to have set his hopes on a culture shift towards Mathland, a shift driven by the effects of this new wave of technology.  If we’re going to build on his ideals, we need to own up to the fact that technology alone isn’t going to make that happen.

I’ve finished reading Mindstorms, and bleargh there’s a lot to say. I’m going to try and plow through a small series of blog posts to get some mental closure on this one, so consider this part 1 of howevermany.

Let’s start from the ending. The final chapter of this book is probably where it should have started (as Papert mentions in the 2nd ed introduction).

In it, Papert writes of “Images of the Learning Society”, his vision for where the future should go.  It’s a hazy vision, high on hopes and short on details or driving forces.  Helpfully, Papert admits that he does *not* see his “Logo environments” as the be-all-end-all solution for anything, but just an early prototype of the sort of things that would make the world a more learning-friendly place.

His key analogy is that of a Brazilian “samba school” as he observed when visiting Brazil one summer.  What he saw there was a social environment with both experts and novices of all ages, from children to grandparents.  People would come “to dance, to drink, to meet their friends”.  However these were social clubs with memberships, with specific choreographed dances they were learning, and everyone is trying to learn a part.  The culmination of their learning was a street procession at carnival where every dance troop would perform their piece.

The samba schools would include times when expert teachers would gather children together, teach them a specific routine or part, and then 20 min later the group would dissolve again into the general hum and activity of the crowd.

The ideals that Papert sees here include some connections to his “Logo environments” of his then-new research.  They are highly social.  Both experts and novices are learning and participating together.  Experts facilitate and help students, but have no set curriculum in his Logo environments.  (Arguably, that’s *not* true of the samba schools – they have a routine they are all attempting to learn together. But it’s driven by the needs of the project, not the needs of a preset list of skills to master.)

Now, let’s stop a second and try to process why this is giving me a headache.

What I’ve written above is a barely summarized version of what is the best description of how these “Logo environments” were *actually run*.  Like, this is all we’re told.  Nowhere in this book does it tell us where these kids come from, how many kids are in the room, how long they’re there for, or what the instructor / facilitators actually DO.  We don’t know if this is a drop-in activity for kids in the area, or if they come from a local school, or if parents have to sign them up in advance.

There are plenty of anecdotes about the student experiences and the sorts of things they do in Logo.  But basically zero of these anecdotes include teacher interaction or any other context of what this “Logo environment” actually is.  They all have a myopic focus on student-computer interaction, with the occasional peer discussion.

And keep in mind this second-hand description, given only in comparison to something else, is at the end of the freaking book.  I think he meant it as a strong conclusion, but it could just as easily be read as an afterthought.  The book makes references to “Logo environments” all along the way without actually describing the environments at all.

Now let’s connect this with where I’m at.

Right now I quite-nearly get to live out exactly what Papert is writing about.  (I am freaking spoiled, it’s wonderful.)  I’m teaching Digital Media Explorations at a middle school and have been basing a large part of my course work in Scratch.  So kids are making highly visual and engaging animations, games, etc and actually scripting their own code.  There is nearly zero set-in-stone curriculum in terms of skills – I’ve set some targets for myself of things I’d like all the kids introduced to, but primarily I’m getting to reward them for trying out new techniques without having to worry about everyone mastering a specific skill set.

So, speaking from inside, let me just say a few things we need to remember.

People matter. Pedagogy matters. Classroom structure matters. The physical environment matters.

There is nothing stopping me from completely wrecking kids’ curiosity and imaginations while they work with Scratch.  I could wreck this no matter how good the tool is.

And there is nothing stopping me from taking the same creative approach to learning into a classroom with no computer technology at all, if someone would budget the time and space to do so.

I’m also signed up for the MIT Media Lab’s “Learning Creative Learning” MOOC, although to be honest I’ve just cherry-picked bits so far to see how their vision compares to Papert’s views from thirty years ago.  The same thing comes up – focusing on the tools with little emphasis on the social aspects of the learning environment.

If we are to truly learn from the early Logo environments, we need to talk about the whole environment.  We can’t discuss and understand educational tools as separate from the social environment they operate in.  If we do, we will fail to understand how to use the tools properly, and we lose the opportunity to critique and learn from those environments that worked.

I’ll stop there, and next post I’ll go into the contrasts Papert makes between the samba schools and his Logo environments and how those contrasts have already killed Mathland.