Fellow
This essay was written last year for the Learning Creative Learning MOOC at MIT. It was originally posted to my personal blog as a response to Seymor Papert's classic introduction to Mindstorms, Gears of My Childhood. I thought I might be appropriate to share it here.
My First Makerspace
Fellow
I and many of my fellow educators at the Children's Museum of Houston have long held a belief that children need to be provided with a free-choice learning environment that stimulates hands-on, minds-on, open-ended explorations into phenomena to help them construct their understanding of topics that interest them. We believe that what we and other children's museums and science centers provide is access to application of ideas and phenomenological explorations that often fly in the face of "common sense understanding."
Fellow
Seymour Papert was definitely ahead of his time when he wrote mindstorms in the 80s. Unfortunately he still seems to be ahead of his time some 30 years later. Instead of hands-on and minds-on education, the current trends in education have pushed us towards accountability, standards and a common framework for education.
Fellow
Reading Mindstorms should be inspirational. I love reading anything that Seymour Papert has written. His words and his vision have always rung true for me and have always motivated and inspired me to infuse the practice he calls "Constructionism" into my classroom. Then what it is about this time through the book that I have been left with such a grey and pessimistic feeling about everything that is the state of public education 35 years after Papert wrote Mindstorms?
