Theoretical foundation
Dewey
Vygotsky
Piaget
Bruner

Contributions
of later work
Papert
CTGV
Gardner

Characteristics

Criticisms

Contributions of later work-Papert

Seymour Papert: Turtles and Beyond

One of Piaget's most famous American pupils, Seymour papert, has influenced profoundly the field of educational technology. Papert began his career as a mathematician. After studying with Jean Piaget in Geneva from 1959 to 1964, Papert became impressed with Piaget's way of "looking at children as active builders of their own intellectual structures". Papert subsequently joined the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began experimenting with Logo, a new programming language, and its use with young children. One of his colleagues was also working with children, teaching them to control a robot in the shape of a turtle. The MIT team decided to combine the two concepts, integrating an on-screen "turtle" and the Logo language. This addition provided the vital link that papert felt would allow children to move more easily from the concrete operations of earlier stages of Piaget's hypothesis to more abstract ones. In 1980, Papert published his theories in a book entitled Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful ideas. This book challenged then-current instructional goals and methods for both mathematics and educational technology, and it became the first widely recognized constructivist statement of educational practice with technology resources.