Seymour Papert has died

Seymour Papert was a great philosopher, whose work on Constructionism has uplifted many children, inspired the OLPC project, and continues to have a huge positive influence on the world.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Constructionism_(learning_theory)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Constructionism_(learning_theo...</a><p>Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from the MIT-AI ITS system. It&#x27;s a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp code, defining where the rubber meets the road, with drivers for hardware like pots, plotters, robotic turtles, TV turtles, graphical displays, XGP laser printers, music devices, and lots of other interesting code and comments.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;donhopkins.com&#x2F;home&#x2F;archive&#x2F;lisp&#x2F;llogo.lisp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;donhopkins.com&#x2F;home&#x2F;archive&#x2F;lisp&#x2F;llogo.lisp</a><p>Here is a Logo Adventure game I wrote for Terrapin, the first program I ever sold, which they distributed with C64 Terrapin Logo, because they wanted a simple non-graphical game that showed off Logo&#x27;s list processing capabilities:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;donhopkins.com&#x2F;home&#x2F;archive&#x2F;logo&#x2F;adventure.logo" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;donhopkins.com&#x2F;home&#x2F;archive&#x2F;logo&#x2F;adventure.logo</a><p>Seymour Papert greatly inspired me, and I applied his work on Constructionist Education to the open source version of SimCity for the OLPC.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;micropolisonline.com&#x2F;static&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;HAR2009Transcript.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;micropolisonline.com&#x2F;static&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;HAR2009Tran...</a>

In 200x, when I was in 4th grade, my teacher said that that day, we would be learning some programming. We were strictly a Mac school, and Scratch wasn&#x27;t as well known at the time, so the language and environment we learned was Terrapin Logo.<p>There&#x27;s nothing like looking at the screen and seeing something that you made come to life for the first time. And there&#x27;s nothing quite like being given a problem that seems impossibly hard at first, cracking it, and seeing the result in front of you. It was a magical moment, and though I would not do any more work in logo (UCBLogo wouldn&#x27;t compile for me), that sense of wonder and magic, and that amazement and the feeling of looking at something, and understanding the complexity that makes it work, and knowing that you designed it, built it, and made it work, that is why I program. For the sheer joy of it.<p>Thank you Seymour, for everything.

I had the honor of meeting Seymour Papert on a few occasions (there&#x27;s no way that he would have remembered me), and coming away awestruck and inspired each time.<p>I also read his books and papers, and did a PhD with one of his best-known students, and never failed to come away thorough amazed by his vision, his dedication, and his ability to execute on so much of that -- partly through great research, partly through great execution on his own, and partly through inspiring generations of students of all ages and backgrounds.<p>Indeed, my PhD research was driven by my interest in pushing Papert&#x27;s vision one step closer to reality. And my work training at companies around the world constantly tries to make things more constructionist, more exploratory, and thus better for my students.<p>If you haven&#x27;t yet read Mindstorms, you should. You might think that it&#x27;s a book about using Logo to teach kids, but it&#x27;s not. Rather, it&#x27;s a book about how children think and learn, and about how to encourage them to think and learn.<p>It&#x27;s terribly sad that Papert has passed away, but his vision and ideas live on amount countless people who are better thinkers and educators as a result.

RIP, Seymour Papert.<p>Scratch is the spiritual successor to Logo.<p>As Scratch becomes more and more popular, it has been sad to say that there is a tension between the spirit of Scratch and commercialization. Scratch is all about exploration and making mistakes and experiential learning. However, there is a deluge of companies who are trying to create curriculums for Scratch that fit into the traditional School lesson models (canned, cut and dry).<p>Here are some of the better alternatives:<p>Google has developed the CS First program which uses Scratch. The interesting thing about this program is that it tries to scale the problem of teaching CS by making it less necessary for the teacher to know CS.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs-first.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs-first.com&#x2F;</a><p>There is also a curriculum guide for Scratch.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scratched.gse.harvard.edu&#x2F;guide&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scratched.gse.harvard.edu&#x2F;guide&#x2F;</a>

&quot;The fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can&#x27;t, anything can be painfully difficult.&quot; [0]<p>Although Papert is most known for Logo, he did not believe learning how to program was specially good in itself.<p>It is the fact that the computer allows the child to model almost everything (at almost no cost) that allowed that child to develop and fall in love with a topic, the same way he fell in love with gears at a very young age.<p>In his own words [1]: &quot;It did not occur to me that anyone could possibly take my statement to mean that learning to program would in itself have consequences for how children learn and think. [...] But encouraging programming as an activity meant to be good in itself is far removed, in its nature, from working at identifying ideas that have been disempowered and seeking ways to re-empower them.&quot;<p>[0] Papert - &quot;Mindstorms&quot; in the Foreword: &#x27;The Gears of My Childhood&#x27;<p>[1] Papert - &quot;What’s the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power&quot;

2016 strikes again. :(<p>Seymour Papert was &quot;co-creator of Logo&quot; in much the same way that Doug Engelbart was &quot;creator of the mouse&quot;. Their ideas were bigger than something you can fit in a headline. Papert believed that computers had a unique potential to help us learn and think. Anyone interested in computers or education should check out his book <i>Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas</i>.

For many years, I completely associated Logo with &quot;turtle graphics&quot; -- like it was a toy for kids to learn programming ideas. I only realized a couple years ago that it&#x27;s a pretty capable language. The best references I found are a 3-volume set that covers using Logo for symbolic computation, making compilers, a diff tool, etc. PDF&#x2F;HTML at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.eecs.berkeley.edu&#x2F;~bh&#x2F;v1-toc2.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;people.eecs.berkeley.edu&#x2F;~bh&#x2F;v1-toc2.html</a>

&quot;People laughed at Seymour Papert in the sixties when he talked about children using computers as instruments for learning and for enhancing creativity.&quot; - I&#x27;m glad he continued his work. My most fond memory of when I first saw a computer.. and it was running logo. I was amazed by all those keys! I would definitely not be here today if it were not for this gentleman. I got into trouble in school for throwing away the provided instructions and started to hack that turtle into writing my name the moment I realized I could control it. I never looked back from that day, I was 8 years old. RIP Seymour.

My office was next door to Seymour&#x27;s office at the Media Lab. This was before the motorcycle accident in Vietnam. I was a freshly arrived student from India. His main observation about India was about how the IITs were terrible for the country because they left such a profound debilitating effect on those who did not make it to those schools.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.c-span.org&#x2F;video&#x2F;?67583-1&#x2F;technology-education" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.c-span.org&#x2F;video&#x2F;?67583-1&#x2F;technology-education</a><p>Technology In Education The committee examined technological advances in education. OCTOBER 12, 1995<p>Alan Brown Superintendent Public Schools<p>Chris Dede Professor George Mason University<p>Jeffrey Joseph Vice President U.S. Chamber of Commerce-&gt;Domestic Policy<p>Alan Kay Fellow Apple Computer-&gt;Learning Concepts<p>Cheryl Lemke Associate Superintendent Illinois-&gt;Board of Education<p>Edward McCracken President and CEO Silicon Graphics<p>Deborah McGriff Senior Vice President Edison Project<p>Robert W. Mendenhall Vice President IBM-&gt;K-12 Industry Division<p>Seymour Papert Professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology-&gt;Technology<p>David Shaw Chief Executive Officer Shaw Investment Company<p>Pat Wright Vice President TCI Educational Technologies

Python has a &quot;logo inspired&quot; turtle in the standard lib: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.python.org&#x2F;3.5&#x2F;library&#x2F;turtle.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.python.org&#x2F;3.5&#x2F;library&#x2F;turtle.html</a><p>We played with it with my son and it brought back memories from the 80s when the French government made a big push on Logo in the schools.

A sad day. My first programming experiences were with Logo, before I even realised that was what it was.<p>In primary school we had a robot turtle attached to a BBC Micro with a long cable which trundled around the floor drawing wonky shapes. At the time it was one of the most amazing things I&#x27;d seen - and was probably similar to, if not exactly the same as this: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.classicacorn.freeuk.com&#x2F;8bit_focus&#x2F;logo&#x2F;logo.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.classicacorn.freeuk.com&#x2F;8bit_focus&#x2F;logo&#x2F;logo.html</a><p>Later, in secondary school, I remember amazing our teacher by getting the Acorn Archimedes we had to produce multicoloured spirograph-like patterns.<p>Being able to type something - and then the computer actually going and doing it (or not) was both frustrating and fantastic, and left me with a lifelong interest in programming and learning new stuff.<p>Thank you Seymour.

One of my favorite Papert quotes from Mindstorms. I think it summarizes the potential of computers to revolutionize learning by empowering children to be autonomous explorers instead of learner-automatons. I hope one day our education systems will recognize this and flip the system, but it&#x27;s hard to change culture:<p><i>IN MOST contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child. In the LOGO environment the relationship is reversed: The child, even at preschool ages, is in control: The child programs the computer. And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves think. The experience can be heady: Thinking about thinking turns the child into an epistemologist, an experience not even shared by most adults.</i>

If you haven&#x27;t read Mindstorms yet and you have any interest at all in how learning, mathematics, and programming are interrelated then please take a moment to go buy it today.<p>There&#x27;s little risk that Papert&#x27;s ideas will fail to last—they are already embedded in so much of how we think about programming—but reading that book helps to emphasize just how far we are away from the ideas he was able to see just by talking with people about how they learn.<p>Truly, truly inspirational man. I&#x27;m sad he&#x27;s now gone.

I&#x27;m an engineer at Pedago, and work on a product called Smartly (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smart.ly" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smart.ly</a>).<p>Although the target audience differs a bit, Papert&#x27;s work was the philosophical bedrock for the work we&#x27;re doing. In fact, when the company was founded, it was agreed upon that it&#x27;d be best for all employees to read Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas. If you haven&#x27;t read this book, and you are even the slightest bit interested in education and how we construct mental models, it&#x27;s definitely worth the read.<p>I only hope he would have approved of what we&#x27;ve tried to build!<p>RIP, Seymour Papert.

Anecdote: Logo was used in French 80s National &quot;Plan Informatique Pour Tous&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fr.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plan_informatique_pour_tous" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fr.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plan_informatique_pour_tous</a> (Computing for all), running on Thomson MO5 terminals distributed in many schools. Kids (6-9yo I believe) would learn to &quot;program&quot; using it. For the younger ones it was mostly about moving that infamous turtle, and that was it. It was still something utterly magical, even though the lightpen bundled with the MO5 was also a big part of it.

If you are an ACM member, you can download Papert&#x27;s classic Mindstorm book here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;citation.cfm?id=1095592&amp;dl=ACM&amp;coll=DL&amp;CFID=650941053&amp;CFTOKEN=72086634&amp;preflayout=flat" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;citation.cfm?id=1095592&amp;dl=ACM&amp;coll=DL&amp;CFI...</a><p>(yes, the lego robot gets its name from this book)

Just yesterday I finished &quot;Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams&quot; by Resnick who builds heavily upon Papert&#x27;s work.<p>Mindstorms is on my backlog.<p>I have fond recollections about my first contact with Turtles. It didn&#x27;t shape me or anything like that, but I&#x27;d like to take Logo out again and play with it.<p>Is there a recommended modernish Logo (running on Windows), or should I simply go to Processing?

His central tenet could be useful in rebuilding the U.S. education systems more like Finland where it is project based, real-world based.<p><i>&quot;The central tenet of his Constructionist theory of learning is that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world.&quot;</i><p><i>&quot;you cannot think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something&quot;</i>

I grew up in the late 70s and early 80s. I first learned about programming from my father, who worked at DEC during its prime. To this day I deeply appreciate him sharing his love of the field with me from ayoung age. My first computer-related memories are learning to program in BASIC on a kit computer we had in our unfinished basement. I loved learning in a cold basement cellar surrounded by pieces of electronic gear in a makeshit office.<p>My second earliest memory about computers centers around learning Logo on an Apple II (I believe) in third grade. I remember exactly what Seymour describes: being shown the basics, and then being free to explore by making the turtle do what I wanted it to. I remember sketching designs in a notebook and then asking enough questions about angles and distances to be able to implement my designs.<p>I think my love of programming comes from an equal mix of people like my father who I could learn from directly, and people like Seymour who created systems that made it possible to learn independently.

Of course, Logo was just a means to an end, something that was meant to be one example of many as to how to introduce children to the medium of computing. As is often the case the wider message was lost -- to me this was much like when englebart died and he was called &quot;the inventor of the mouse.&quot; Mindstorms is a must read.

You can try LOGO in your browser with this Javascript-based interpreter by the inimitable Joshual Bell: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.calormen.com&#x2F;jslogo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.calormen.com&#x2F;jslogo&#x2F;</a>

Seymour Papert and Paulo Freire Debate Technology and the Future of Schools<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;4V-0KfBdWao" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;4V-0KfBdWao</a>

Seymour Papert was an inspiring and caring researcher, and he will inspire many generations to come. His work was truly groundbreaking, subtle and profound, and I encourage everyone to read some of his books, notably Mindstorm and Children&#x27;s Machine<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful-Ideas&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0465046746&#x2F;ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1470065417&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=mindstorm+book+papert" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerfu...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Childrens-Machine-Rethinking-School-Computer&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0465010636" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Childrens-Machine-Rethinking-School-C...</a>

LogoWriter was my entry into programming. I started with the turtle in elementary school, and in early high school my mind was blown when I leaned about the &quot;flip side&quot;, where you could use functions and script things.<p>In grade 7 I used it to make an elaborate multi screen Sierra inspired game that took the better part of the year to make. What I would give to have a copy of it now...<p>RIP. Thanks for Logo and everything else.

Anyone interested in educational technology should read Mindstorms and Powerful Ideas. Papert described how technology should be used in schools and also predicted most issues and trends with education today.<p>Papert work is also present in most educational&#x2F;programming toys we see today - Scratch, Kibo <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kinderlabrobotics.com&#x2F;kibo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kinderlabrobotics.com&#x2F;kibo&#x2F;</a>, LittleBits, LEGO Mindstorms all owe their roots to Paperts ideas.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;MeanwhileAtCodeOrg&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;MeanwhileAtCodeOrg&#x2F;</a>

You can find some of his work at: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.papert.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.papert.org&#x2F;</a><p>and more background info on him on Wikipedia: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Seymour_Papert" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Seymour_Papert</a>

New York Times coverage, &quot;Seymour Papert, 88, Dies; Saw Education’s Future in Computers&quot;:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;02&#x2F;technology&#x2F;seymour-papert-88-dies-saw-educations-future-in-computers.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;02&#x2F;technology&#x2F;seymour-pape...</a>

Logo was the first language that familiarized me with the fundamentals of programming and got me excited about computers back when I was in 4th grade in India, in the late 90s. It&#x27;s amazing how a person&#x27;s vision and hard work can have such far-reaching impact. I&#x27;m grateful for his life and work. Rest in Peace Seymour Papert.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Turtles

Wow, RIP - he was a big inspiration to me professionally both in terms of the tech he helped build and in terms of the learning theory of which he was a proponent. (I also work at the intersection of education, learning sciences, and technology).<p>[0] is a great video from the early days of LOGO, and he&#x27;s pushing notions of programming for all that felt new and revolutionary in the 2000s.<p>Mindstorms [1] is a great book if you&#x27;re interested in his ideas about learning.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xMzojQFyMo0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xMzojQFyMo0</a><p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.com&#x2F;0465046746" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amzn.com&#x2F;0465046746</a>

As a child of the 80s logo was one of the first languages that I learned. Although the relative motion was difficult to understand, and functions seemed to be impossibly hard - they worked eventually. 15 years later when I encountered functional programming for the first time I remember the shock and awe that somebody had the foresight to plantvthose seeds so long in advance.<p>Later still I became a teacher, and learning about constructivism for the first time I encountered Seymour&#x27;s published body of work. So mindblowing. The passion and the vision inspired my career.<p>RIP Seymour, you will be missed, but after what you have given to the world you will never be forgotten.

Actually, when you look at any kind of programming, it is:<p>Turtles, turtles all the way down.<p>RIP

I never had the opportunity to use Logo, but I think it&#x27;s obvious how much influence Seymour had on our industry and many of our paths. RIP.

I very clearly remember using Logo in 1st grade over 30 years ago. Looking back, it was clearly what hooked me to get into CS.<p>Thanks Dr. Papert!

I just installed Scratch and I find it awful but I am not a teenager. When a child realize that to simulate a small movement or scene you need to feed the computer with a lot of parameters he&#x2F;she get bored. Fractals, like the Julia image, inspire us with deep thinking. What we want is to learn new concepts in such a way that the ratio power&#x2F;(number of parameters) is very low. The logo idea is not about a turtle or a moving pen, is about the realization that you can draw complex images with a few parameters. I see loops as a form of parameters in a program. Snake moving is boring, we want to drive a drone. Virtual reality is a way of improving the way in which we feed parameters to the machine, another way is the machine learning about the programmer, completion of sentences, suggestions and predictions are a first step. A new logo is needed but one without turtles.

I had just started learning NetLogo, which led me to Lhogho, a compiled Logo, and then references to Seymour Papert&#x27;s book Mindstorms that piqued my interest. I&#x27;ll have to give it a go seeing as how many people have spoken so highly of this book. Sad news go lose such a thinker.

History of the original LOGO turtle (the actual robot):<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyberneticzoo.com&#x2F;cyberneticanimals&#x2F;1969-the-logo-turtle-seymour-papert-marvin-minsky-et-al-american&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyberneticzoo.com&#x2F;cyberneticanimals&#x2F;1969-the-logo-tur...</a>

What an awesome contribution. I had a good chat with an educationalist about Logo and the hardware device that I experienced in the 70&#x27;s with a pen that we programmed in primary school, we had a super progressive maths heavy headmaster, hey, maybe that explains something...anyway, a comment was that the more modern turtles made the pen inside the device less obvious and that this small change led to a diminished experience as the children did not get to see first hand the final act of creation, instead it came out of a &#x27;magic box&#x27; that did something they maybe did not comprehend, these kind of subtle things show that inter-disciplinary work is super important.

I did not have a fortune to get to know the LOGO or even SMALLTALK languages. By the time I&#x27;ve heard about it, it is the C++ or even C, and all us &quot;professionals&quot; dismissed this. I&#x27;ve just read up on the LOGO language on the Wiki, and some of its fortes are based on its roots in functional (encouraging recursions over a set) and declarative style. These people were already thinking about many years ahead for me. I would imagine my career would have been more enriched if I have encountered this early on in my life.

Perceptrons remains one of my favorite books in many ways. Obviously the single-layer networks Minsky &amp; Papert analyze are very primitive relative to today&#x27;s deep neural networks, and the actual mathematical content may not be of direct use today. But the arguments were beautiful &amp; insightful, and the exposition clear. For anyone interested in a mathematical understanding of computation in (artificial) neural networks, it&#x27;s still not a bad place to start.

I made an account today, just to comment on this news. Seymour Papert&#x27;s work on Constructionism really struck a chord with me. I first learned about his work in college, and things like Logo really resonated with me - to point where I have now changed my career path from an engineer to one that is more education focused. I really hope people everywhere, and at least users on this site will learn more about his work and his importance.

This is the first time I&#x27;ve heard of Seymour, but it looks like he really tried to increase education around programming and computers, especially with younger kids&#x2F;teenagers (e.g. Logo in Lego Windstorms, One Laptop Per Child), and for that I&#x27;m deeply respectful. Making computers and programming more accessible is really wonderful.<p>RIP Seymour Papert.

He said “the fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can’t, anything can be painfully difficult.” This is very revealing about the actual nature of learning, human and machine, and it&#x27;s something that the ML community has simply ignored.

Sad day.<p>I think Bret Victor is right in that Seymour Papert&#x27;s ideas are not useful only in teaching children about computers.<p>This essay inspired by Mindstorms is a great read <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;LearnableProgramming&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;LearnableProgramming&#x2F;</a>

NY Times : <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;02&#x2F;technology&#x2F;seymour-papert-88-dies-saw-educations-future-in-computers.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;02&#x2F;technology&#x2F;seymour-papert-88-d...</a>

my first memory of using a computer is Logo where we were asked to do anything. I usually gave very large numbers and got interesting geometric patterns on my screen ...exciting stuff for a 10 year old.

As a math teacher with a background in computer science, Papert&#x27;s work has influenced me tremendously, although I never got the chance to meet him.<p>His spirit lives on in his books.

Seymour Papert Tribute at IDC 2013<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tltl.stanford.edu&#x2F;papert_tribute" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tltl.stanford.edu&#x2F;papert_tribute</a>

Learning Logo on a Microbee in 1987 was my first introduction to computers. I remember being immensely excited when I figured out how to draw a circle.

RIP. Also check <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;phratch.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;phratch.org</a>

This post might be competing for the &quot;Most time spent on the front page&quot; Award, right?

Where I met Logo:<p>1984, Devotion School, Brookline, Massachusetts, Apple computers, Then at home: TI-99&#x2F;4A.<p>You?

PU WAIT 7200 PD<p>Thanks for your work, Mr. Papert

Announcement on front page of the Logo Foundation: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;el.media.mit.edu&#x2F;logo-foundation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;el.media.mit.edu&#x2F;logo-foundation&#x2F;</a>

Black bar, please.

He came to my high school to teach for the academic year when I was 16<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;University_Laboratory_High_School_(Urbana,_Illinois)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;University_Laboratory_High_Sch...</a><p>He was a very, very warm person that clearly loved children. I remember him juggling oranges (or balls?).<p>I wanted to work with Papert and implemented LOGO with graphics on the university&#x27;s computers when I was 16 using an instruction manual from Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now BBN Tech). I still remember showing it to him.