Reddit reviews Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas
We found 6 Reddit comments about Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Not much of theory to base your teaching on, but A mathematician's lament is a nice read.
I like Papert, so you could read Mindstorms or look about Constructionism (his theory).
There are some French guys that I like as well, such as Brousseau and Duval. Duval in particular is very nice.
As for general pedagogy, you could read on the classical psychologists, such as Piaget and Vygotsky, or an introduction in general to see which ideas you like best.
I'd recommend reading two books:
A lot of mathematics before college is taught in an uninspired, disconnected way by poor, unmotivated teachers. Students are often given no way to connect what they're learning with anything they understand intuitively. Having never been given the opportunity to flourish mathematically, they have resigned themselves to being "not good at math". It indicates a failure of the system they were educated in. If someone says they're bad at math, I usually ask them about the experiences that led them to that conclusion. Though sometimes people just say that so I'll shut up about math. If that's what they're doing (and if I can tell that that's what they're doing), I usually just shut up about math.
If you're interested in how mathematics education is failing our children, I cannot recommend Saymour Papert's Mindstorms enough. It's a fantastic read.
Horrific. And having done a thousand-page book for beginners myself, I wouldn't wish such a monstrous weight on either authors or readers. Heck, back when I was in educational publishing, we considered it a failing not to give readers everything they needed to know in fifty.
Want to know how to make a language that can be taught in 50? Read Papert's Mindstorms. And his Logo language was a stealth Forth/Lisp too, which is a whole new level of power (metaprogramming) available for exploring if/when/should users wish to go further, while Swift can't even imagine providing such capability without crashing to a stop.
> Until you have something you want to put on the website so you can show it to the world, what do you want with a website?
I won't go so far as to say that this is how Scratch is usually used in the classroom or whatever, but if you look into the literature behind the creation of Logo (the ancestor of Scratch) you can see that this was absolutely the guiding principle behind its design. The turtle (sprite) is thought of as an "object to think with", and you use it to try to follow your curiosity, answering questions you might have about how (say) gravity works, or the relationship between different parts of a system of gears.
Using Scratch would be a lot more effective if people go back to the original rationale behind why it was created in the first place: https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful-Ideas/dp/0465046746
I know it's always "don't argue on the internet" but this joke is horrible. It captures the intellectual laziness that arises from most testing, but does so at cost of ignoring how flagrantly inhumane they are to begin with.
Nobody is "good" at test taking. Filling in bubbles on staged, artificial questions with dubious motivation is an artifice so far away from anything you can reasonably be good at it's a joke to even relate the terms. You can be not bad at it—it's not hard—or you could decide that if that's the reason why you're here, spending all day locked in a thrill-less environment then you'd rather just opt out.
People who are good at tests are ones who have become addicted to the validation it brings in one way or another. This addiction is a poison as while validation from authorities is tremendously useful in society, it's also increasingly a farce as you become more and more of an authority yourself. This happens naturally, by aging or becoming more skillful or networked, so if you do not kick that poison at some point then you will find yourself seeking validation from those who have not the time or energy or skill to determine whether what you're doing deserves validation at all.
Tosh clearly knows what many high school students learn—taking tests and doing well enough on them can be a minimal involvement exercise that frees you up to do more interesting things in life. It's like paying taxes. Nobody is good at paying taxes except for accountants, but we all realize that if we just do it then we can go back to living in what is morally a tax-free world.
If you don't discover that kind of motivation, though, or can't quite pick up the addiction to external validation, then the way that schools tie merit, accomplishment, and power to this whole noxious affair will kill your spirit, heart, and mind.
Read A Mathematician's Lament which discusses the terrible state of affairs around math education—a thing that leads one of the most beautiful endeavors of humankind anemic, hidden, and feared by the majority of "educated" society.
Or if you're looking for optimism, read Mindstorms to see how teaching children to play, create, struggle with real problems and then inherit the tools and technology of their ancestors to grow, and fly, reverses some of that effect. The author of that book was able to convince children who hated mathematics that it was lovely, fun, and something they were quite talented at in just a few months.
The movie Idiocracy suggested that we were evolving towards stupidity because of reproductive pressure favoring people who foolishly have more children. Instead, I think we're already here due to an educational system which actively destroys the minds of our children before they even have a chance to use them.
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