Seymour Papert, one of the creators of the
Logo programming language and a significant influence behind One Laptop
Per Child and Lego Mindstorms, died Sunday at home in Maine. He was 88.
On Monday, the Logo Foundation announced Papert’s passing in a tweet, but it did not cite a cause of death. Papert had sustained a serious brain injury after being hit by a motorcycle in Vietnam in 2006.
Papert was born February 29, 1928 in Pretoria,
South Africa, where he completed his doctorate in mathematics in 1952
at the University of the Witwatersrand. He then emigrated to the United
Kingdom, where he completed another doctorate at Cambridge University.
After bouncing around European universities in the early 1960s as a
researcher, he finally landed at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1963.
Four years later, he was made co-director of
the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he was the co-creator
of Logo, a simple programming language taught to children. The language
involved a turtle that can draw simple lines and shapes. (I was first
exposed to Logo on an Apple IIe while growing up in 1980s Southern
California.)
Papert also pioneered “constructionist learning,”
the idea that students learn most efficiently when they participate in
semi-self-directed projects that are designed to push their own
learning. The computer scientist helped push his adopted home state
toward the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, an ambitious project to give Apple laptops to all of its middle school students and half of its high school students.
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