![]() ![]() The computer-controllable Lego allows children to endow their physical constructs with behavior. For this reason, we see elementary school as the critical moment.įunding of Media Lab research from Interlego A/S, the Danish company that owns Lego in the US, has resulted in an important contribution to products in Lego's Dacta division ("LEGO TC Logo" and "Control Lab"), which have been used in elementary and secondary schools by more than one million children. If the roots of a small plant are damaged, fertilizer will do only so much, no matter the amount or method of application. This oddity, however, reflects precisely the shared agenda of Lego and the Media Lab: understanding the acquisition of knowledge at very young ages. People frequently smile when they hear such an odd marriage of a leading world toy manufacturer with an institution of higher learning and advanced research. Papert is the Lego Professor of Learning Research at MIT. I expect that number to drop to 15 by the year 2000. ![]() In spite of its inception as a tool for the august and older academic community, the average age of an Internet user today is 26 (a number derived with considerable care by MIT undergraduates Jonathan Litt and Craig Wisneski). While we can only roughly estimate that 30 million people use the Internet's 2,217,000 host machines (as of January 1994), trying to guess their ages is even more difficult. And nobody can surely identify children there. On the Internet, by contrast, a child's voice knows no boundary. Now, with multimedia, we are faced with a number of closet drill-and-practice believers, who think they can colonize the pizazz of a Sega game to squirt a bit more information into the thick heads of children. In the 1960s, most pioneers in computers and education advocated a crummy drill-and-practice approach, using computers on a one-on-one basis, in a self-paced fashion, to teach those same God-awful facts more effectively. Worse, those young people didn't learn a thing about learning and, for the most part, have had the love of it whipped out of them. ![]() Over the next four years they'll feel like marathon runners asked to go rock climbing at the finish line. Children in Japan are more or less dead on arrival when they enter the university system. Let me point out the heavy price paid in those countries for requiring young minds to master this apparent font of knowledge. So what? I'll bet you don't know that Reno is west of Los Angeles. Most American children do not know the difference between the Baltics and the Balkans, or who the Visigoths were, or when Louis XIV lived. I'm always amazed when I read about how badly young Americans are educated, not because such statements are necessarily untrue, but because most authors and critics go on to compare our children with those of France, Korea, or Japan, whose brains have been stuffed with thousands of facts. ![]()
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