Putting a Camcorder in the Hands of Children
Get your children out from in front of a TV and behind a camcorder.Computers now program our children. Seymour Papert brought this to our attention back in 1980 with a book called Mindstorms. He showed that, even at that early stage, educators used computers only as info-jukeboxes.
More so today, PCs play back pre-loaded data into the hungry minds of the young. We watch them click their way through menus and call it "interactive learning." Papert proposed we instead teach children to program computers.
He thought simple computer programming would develop the habits of thought that lead to mathematics. In "teaching" a computer to perform, a child analyzes his own thinking process. He then communicates its steps to a machine using a simple language. The child is no longer merely the consumer of the data in the machine. He becomes the teacher of the machine.
In so doing, he learns both the limits of the device and the patterns of his own thought. Shouldn't we call this ability to communicate with and through a computer true computer literacy? It's more like speaking a new language than shopping for…
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